Do you have trouble with verbs in your new language? You’re not alone if you do. That is why we have just launched our “Automatic verb tagging” feature. It’s only available in certain languages right now: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian and German. We are planning to continue adding this feature for other languages going forward.
For those of you studying the languages which have this feature, you will start noticing these automatic tags every time you create a verb LingQ. The tags will identify the person, infinitive form of the verb, and verb tense. There can be multiple tags verbs and verb tenses depending on the word you are LingQing. But, in general, this should be very helpful in helping you understand the verbs better and helping you recognize the tenses better.
Review Using Tags
This is also an opportunity to promote reviewing using the tags. A great way to use our vocabulary review system is by going to the Vocabulary page, filtering by tag and reviewing targeted vocabulary lists rather than just general review. If you are using LingQ like we recommend you should be creating far too many LingQs than you can possibly review. However, by using tags to help you create specific lists, you can focus on specific vocabulary like verb tenses or even tag word or phrases you want to focus on with a “focus”, “high priority” or “important” tag.
Obviously, the same ability now exists with these automatic verb tags. You can filter by “imperfect” to focus on that tense and only review your LingQs with that verb tense to help you learn it.
We hope you will enjoy the new verb tagging feature! If you prefer your LingQs clean or like to create your own tags, you can turn this feature off in the Reader settings. Otherwise, let us know what you think. As I said before, we will eventually roll this out for all languages.
I had to hunt down this post in the forums in order to find out what this new option is. Hover-activated contextual help in the reader settings might be one way to help folks understand changes like this more easily.
Great feature! Thanks so much for implementing, Mark and team!
One remark, though: While it’s very helpful to create tags for different grammatical forms of a word - e.g. “tú” or “condicional” in the screenshot above - I think it’s not so useful to create tags for the base form of every word that you save as a LingQ - e.g. “definir” or “definirse”. I prefer to have tags only for the aforementioned bigger categories because if you really would add all base forms and infinitives as a tag, you’d end up with a sheer endless list of tags which kinda defeats the purpose of creating tags in the first place.
Therefore, it would be very cool if you could add a feature with which we could choose which tags the system creates. I hope I could get my meaning across.
Glad you like it! You may not find all the tags useful but others will. I can see both using the tags for the root form and the person to review with. I suggest that if you don’t think you’ll use some of the tags, you can delete them as you see them. There is also no harm in simply ignoring them. There is no downside in having lots of tags. Just search for the tag you are looking for.
Glad you like it! We have some additional grammar related information coming but, in the meantime, you will have to just check what comes up for different tenses. If you ignore and then re-LingQ previously saved verb forms, the tags will be added.
I really appreciate the tagging system. Here is a note about my experience with a specific type of word.
For Portuguese:
Past participles get tagged as ‘condicional’ and ‘futuro do pretérito composto’. This seems to be consistent.
Participles appear a LOT in the materials I am processing with LingQ.
The tag should be :
particípio passado
I have been changing this manually, and I don’t recall if I added this tag myself or it was part of the inventory. This is the term that is used in Portuguese grammar books.
Past participles can have four different forms (slight oversimplification):
(1) past participle masculine singular (end in -do)
(2) past participle masculine plural (end in -dos)
(3) past participle feminine singular (end in -da)
(4) past participle feminine plural (end in -das)
So a verb such as ‘desaparecer’ disappear can have four forms:
I’m glad you’re enjoying the tagging. It would be nice to label the past participle that way but that isn’t how we get the information I’m afraid. We are still working to improve this but I would think Participio is most likely to be the label since it does appear in so many different tenses.
Yes, the endings are a tricky one. There isn’t much we can do there I’m afraid. For the most part, the past participle appears in the o form. For the other forms you will just have to know that and tag them yourself if you like. In fact, if you just learn the base form, the other forms are easy enough to figure out.
