I’ve been thinking about how to better master conjugation for the Spanish language, and I have two ideas. I’m hoping for some feedback on them since I’m curious as to why they don’t seem to have caught on elsewhere.
More principle parts:
In the classes I’ve been taking, verbs like mentir and establecer are regarded as irregular, but they seem to follow some predictable rules. Apparently, the reason they’re considered irregular is because we treat all verbs as if they have only one principle part: the infinitive. And obviously, we can’t predict whether a verb changes its stem, or does anything else weird, using only that part. So I raised the base-number to seven:
(1) Infinitive
(2) Gerundive
(3) Participle
(4) Present-indicative yo
(5) Present-indicative él/ella/ usted
(6) Preterit-indicative ellos/ellas/ ustedes
(7) Future-indicative yo
Using these parts, most stem-changing verbs become regular, while most highly irregular verbs (like tener and querer) become more easily memorized.
Additional verb paradigms:
Verbs derived from tener and poner tend exhibit the same strange patterns, and so putting then together as their own special paradigms would be a useful memorization aid. This idea has rather limited application, since verbs derived from decir seem to follow regular future and conditional tense conjugations, unlike decir itself.
I’m honestly a little bit disappointed, since 21 people viewed the thread in the past four days, but nobody had anything to say about whether these were good or bad ideas, or any questions about why I made the decisions I did.
For example, Why these parts specifically? or Why seven parts when Latin only needed four?
I can definitely answer those questions.
I chose the seven parts I did because parts (1) and (4) through (7) allow us to derive the simple conjugations as follows:
Parts (1) and (4) together give us the subjunctive present forms, and by extension the usted, nosotros, and ustedes command forms, as well as all negative commands;
Part (5) gives us the remaining present indicative forms (in the event that part (4) does something unpredictable, and the verb is otherwise stem-changing), and the affirmative tú command;
Part (6) gives us the remaining subjunctive tenses for the given verb;
Part (7) gives the future and conditional tenses;
Parts (2) and (3) allow us to derive the haber and estar constructions.
As for why I chose seven parts, if I couldn’t make some of the more annoying verbs regular, I could at least make them less annoying (meaning more predictable). I saw two options: add more rules for verb conjugation (e.g., “-go” rules, and rules for preterit stems), or add more principle parts. The first option would have been fine for me, but I realized that the new rules would be far from straightforward for most people, and it seemed that at least some of the rules I had in mind would require adding at least one more principle part anyway, so I took the simpler route. (So saying, I was sorely tempted to add an eighth principle part to regularize the imperfect stems, but since my instructors have insistent that only three verbs are irregular in that tense, it seemed like the effort would serve little purpose. It strikes me as rather unlikely that any new verbs will exhibit irregular imperfect forms.)
I really don’t know if that would be a good idea, but only because I’d probably get myself into a big mess if I tried. I’ve never tried creating a course.
Hi, I suggested a video to someone else a few days ago. You also might find it helpful.
Hi @Quesingo I think this short video may help you. His example shows the creation of a German course for English speakers - the German (Foreign) words are put into the left most column.
It’s probably best to completely avoid using comma separated items (CSV). And, as shown in the video, by copying and pasting from a spreadsheet you’ll automatically be generating tab separated items.
There’s nothing to stop you creating a test course - just leave the Status set to “Incomplete” while you experiment with the features. Good luck.