Spanish has around 60 unique conjugations of every verb and I’m wondering if I should be LingQing every conjugation of the same verb? Is there a way to collapse them into their infinitive form?
If I’m reviewing flashcards, I don’t think I want to see 20 different conjugations of the same verb in my set. I’d be happy to manually LingQ verbs as their infinitive but it doesn’t look like there’s a way to do that. LingQing all verb encounters seems like it would overweight verbs during review by a pretty big factor.
The current implementation is really useful for irregular conjugations, but for the vast majority it seems less a feature and more an annoyance or worse. Is there another strategy for dealing with this?
One thing I like about LingQ, is that it is flexible enough to be used to your learning taste. I know Steve says he doesn’t like to study grammar etc, and dives right in to reading. If doing so, lingqing each conjugation would make sense. I don’t mind studying a grammar foundation first, so for Spanish I simply lingq new verbs or forms I’d like to review. If I run across them again and I can’t remember, I can always choose to lingQ them at that time.
Sometimes I do lingQ multiple forms if I’m not remembering the original verb I lingqed, but if I’ve later seen it a bunch and feel comfortable with it, I’ll manually change the status to reflect where it should be including marking it known. I’d rather spend my time enjoying the content and moving forward than be overly strict about the method or tool.
My advice would be to use it however you think would be best!
I know that this way of counting words seem a bit strange at first but in practice it works well. I’ve learned Russian here on Lingq, for which this issue is much more pronounced and it was no problem at all.
Your doubt is in fact not so much related to how words are counted but to how to review flashcards. Here is some advice about this:
a) Reviewing flashcards is not the most important part of the Lingq system. Many of us don’t use it often and those that do don’t try to review everything. You’ll learn by encountering vocabulary as you read/listen anyway.
b) Earlier than you think, the amount of words to be reviewed will be way beyond what you can manage to review. That’s the way it is, no matter what you do or how Lingq treats word forms.
c) Once that happens you have a number of options: not review, just keep on reading; review randomly, just a few words that Lingq chooses to present to you (which is what Steve seems to do); tag words and filter words based on a particular set of tags every at a time; a combination of those strategies
d) Now, going into what your current concern: use the automatic tagging system to control what verb forms you want to review. Notice that you can choose the “automatic grammar tag” feature in the settings. That will automatically tag your words. In the case of verbs it will tag forms with the appropriate tense. When you’re reviewing filter by the relevant tag and only corresponding verb forms will be displayed
What I don’t advise is using conjugation tables. That is the more abstract wya of looking at verbs. What I would advise is to get lots of exposure to listening and reading to see the verb conjugations being implemented. You will notice naturally and eveventually see the patterns. I have a blog post of why I don’t prefer conjugation tables. https://learnlanguageslive.weebly.com/methods/why-do-i-not-prefer-conjugation-tables