I think it depends a lot on what feels right for you; I picked up noticing different tenses from other markers in the same context, e.g. if “yesterday” is in the sentence, it’s likely that they’re talking in past tense, and from that you can notice patterns. It doesn’t need to be in the same sentence, of course, it might be in the same paragraph. It’s not going to be correct all of the time, but you get used to it and work it out naturally.
I’m happy to have the translation down in the example above as “buy” if I can see the rest of the sentence, and if I see it in LingQ as “Yesterday, I go to the shop and buy a book”, I know that’s not going to be quite right, so I’ll pay attention to areas that usually change on verbs. You know from reading that it’s meant to read as “Yesterday, I went to the shop and bought a book”. With this example, as well, you can see where a tense table might trick you; if you’re relying on morphology being regular, usually you’d expect “goed” and “buyed” instead of “went” and “bought”, but this would make you wrong here, but if you learn these via osmosis, you’ll learn the language in a more natural way.
Of course, this is a lot slower than learning it from drilling a few tense tables and applying this to anything that isn’t irregular, but for me, it’s more fun.
I am not sure that drilling is any faster in the long run. It might be for some people but all my time spent over tables has been in vain. Only when I focused on context did my sense of these patterns improve.
You may well be right, Steve, I must admit that my thought that drilling tenses is faster is going back to my school days with conventional wisdom (and possibly the hope that if I ever needed to rush, I could do that to speed up the process).
Peter, I’m happy with achèterai, achèteront and all forms like it to simply have ‘will buy’ without regards to the person. As you said, you’ll see the person in context. I’m picking up some of the endings for person already but still can’t work out which tenses they belong to.
Steve, I really can’t stand drilling and all types of exercises. All I want to know - what makes a verb tick. How does it work?
I see from these achèterai and achèteron verbs that there is an addition onto the end of the infinitive for the future here. That’s perfect. No memorising of forms. Just getting at the essence of it all. There are 3 declensions of verbs? -er -ir and -re, I believe there are a few exceptions with verbs ending in certain things buy they can be easily learned. Irregulars are easy because they are so common. I’m going to take your advice and find a quick description of the most essential points on verbs. I like to write these things by hand for some reason. There’s something about the manual printing of patterns which prints them into my memory. That will fix my problem within a couple of weeks.
Verbs are classified into 3 groups: those ending by -er, some of those ending by -ir, and all the rest (-ir, -oir, -indre, -dre, -ettre, -re). The first two groups are easy, I don’t even know if there are exceptions. The third one is a pain when it comes to conjugating the présent but you’ll learn gradually.
Verbs ending by -ir might bother you until you know their present forms. A verb ending by -ir belongs to the 2nd group when its present form at “nous” ends in -issons. It also works with “vous” or with the present participle.
nous finissons, vous finissez, en finissant => finir 2nd group
nous courons*, vous courez*, en courant => courir 3rd group
*one “r”, otherwise it’s the future.
The major difficulty is the present tense of the 3rd group. The other tenses are relatively easy
If you lingQ the verb forms in a lazy and partially wrong manner, I expect that you will have more problems to use the correct forms actively and to become fluent …
What do you think?
What I really miss on LingQ is the ability to add the infinitive or the basic word form to a LingQ. Ideally than I could open the LingQ of the basic word form from here and open a dictionary with the conjugation and different word forms of this word. A dream? Some dreams become true …
@hape - I don’t really agree with that. The way I see it is that you probably won’t learn the correct forms of most of those words from the LingQs you’ve created. Instead, it’s all the thousands of examples in your listening and reading that will drive it home for you. Once you get a good handle on the overall rule (e.g. how to conjugate -er verbs) you can apply it to any words you know (irrespective of incorrect or lazy LingQing). If you come across an incorrect LingQ at this stage, you will be able to correct it if you want.
It would be nice to able to indicate the type of LingQ, e.g. Verb, Noun, etc… If it’s a verb, then it should show the infinitive, and the current form you are looking at. I know you can add comments in yourself, but for languages that support it, a little more integration would be nice. Also, at the beginning stages, it would be nice to actually be able to differentiate what is a verb, noun, etc…
Sometimes the translation from google is bad, and can make little sense. It’s definitely worth spending the time to note down in the comments for the LingQ, why it is in such a form. (Finding this information yourself will actually help you learn the rule)
That’s why I like the dictionnary Lingvo because it always gives the word in the basic form: Infinitive for verbs, nounns and adjectives in Nominative Sg even if you cross over the other form of words.
There is a problem with it though. A problem which would require a rather difficult programming feat to solve:
verbs forms which are written the same other words.
In some languages, this won’t matter at all but in others it would be nothing short of madness trying to deal with the automated lingqs being created. What if I’m familiar with one form and not another? ‘known’ will make them all known when I’d rather it didn’t? Problems abound with all approaches.
“If you lingQ the verb forms in a lazy and partially wrong manner, I expect that you will have more problems to use the correct forms actively and to become fluent …
What do you think?”
You can add whatever you want to the Hint, the infinitive, the gender, whatever you want. You can also Tag words that you feel belong together. In any case, most words that are just inflected forms of other words, will show up together in the A-Z view on the Vocab page.
We have dictionary resources like Le Conjugueur for French, and Alex is adding some other resources suggested by Eugrus, and we can add more grammar resources so that you can more easily look up more grammar information for each LingQ.
Alternatively keep a table open in another tab for reference and make sure you Tag your LingQ for the case or tense.
I really do not understand why this subject keeps on coming up.
Steve, I add the infinitive or the basic word form to my hints. Unfortunately I cannot use the reverse flashcarding and the cloze test because I see the infinitive in the hint which makes it useless. I use the Tags too (I use them a lot) but as long as they not appear when I hover over a LingQ they are not as useful as they could be.
Steve, the thread originally was about how I don’t know which forms to put into the hints because of not knowing the way the language works (past, future, etc…I’ve got no idea) and then everyone had their own thing to add.
When I see the infinitive it is too easy. For example “regardez” has the hint “regarder v. (sie) schauen”. If I see “regarder” in the hint it is to simple to guess the french word.
Everyone learns differently no doubt but I do not find it so useful to have to think long and hard about things. For me easy is good. I prefer to see words and forms often and that frequent exposure is more effective than having to scratch my brain. I would imagine that taking the trouble to put the infinitive on the Hint and then seeing it when I see the various forms of the verb and seeing them in texts would do the trick, not to mention the fact the infinitive follows a pattern which the brain will pick up on.
I am quick to agree with “everyone learns differently” sentiment but I must say I have changed my way of learning for the better by 1) not racking my brain too much 2) not worrying about correct translations 3) looking at the flashcards as merely a stepping stone into the language. The object is to get into the world of the text; both spoken and written. Making accurate flashcards is not a focus in my case. Even if getting into the world of the text implies lazy self-deception to some degree, in the end the exposure should right most of the wrongs.
