The best app for Spanish verbs conjugations
Living in Spain, I’m chasing the dream of speaking Spanish. As you probably know, it’s very hard or even impossible to live here without the knowledge. If you visit Spain on vacation, then, in the center of cities and in tourist places most probably you can be understood in English. But if you want to settle down and feel comfortable in day-to-day scenarios such as going to a hairdresser, a bank, or a hospital, then, you definitely should know Spanish at least on a B2 level.
In this article, I want to share my road to the point, where I’ve decided to build an app — Take and Learn (completely free, only for Android devices at this point) to help accelerate studying Spanish for me and for everyone. I don’t want to sound like a cliche: “This app will change your life”, because it won’t. I just want to show my pain point in studying Spanish and how I solved the problem for myself.
Spanish conjugations
The most difficult part of learning Spanish for me is not vocabulary or listening. Living in Spain gives you a chance constantly be under the influence of Spanish: you hear it on the streets, from colleagues, on TV, and at festivals and events. The most difficult part for me is tenses (in my mother tongue we have only 3 — past, present, and future, whereas in Spanish there are 16!) and their conjugations.
In Spanish, there are 3 classes of verbs: ar, er, ir — according to what the ending of a verb is and these 3 classes have different endings in different tenses for each pronoun: I, you, he/she, they, etc. Just imagine how many combinations you have to study!
Studying Spanish tenses
Every book and every learning material on the Internet has the same pattern to learn a new tense:
- A table with 3 regular verbs (usually they are the same for some reason: trabajar, comer, vivir) and their conjunctions for each pronoun
- A table with the most popular irregular verbs
- Rules. When you should use this tense
- Exercises — basically, sentences, where you need to put a verb in the right tense in a placeholder.
As for me, the most difficult transition is to the 4th step. When I see exercises, I struggle to put verbs in the right form, because I cannot remember how they conjugate from a previous page. So, I constantly go back and forth between pages during these exercises and after completing all of them I still don’t have certainty that I can use and conjugate on my own.
Moreover, after some time, you want to refresh tenses, that you learned a week or a month ago and you search for some exercises online just to practice conjugations.
Working on the app
Thus, I was really interested in finding a simple trainer for conjunctions, to which I can return from time to time to strengthen my memory.
In reality, it wasn’t as simple, as I imagined. Apps (mobile or web), that I’ve found have a poor design/UI, which increases the difficulty to use them or have a very limited number of verbs/tenses to train. Some apps are so arrogant that you have to pay to practice more verbs — imagine, you should pay for verbs, that are already in an app's database, locally on your phone!
All in all, I haven’t found any tool, that suited me and my needs. As a developer, if you cannot find a suitable solution, then, build it yourself! At least, that’s what I did, based on the fact, that this is not rocket science — to have a simple way to train tenses from time to time.
Take and learn
“So be it. I will create an application that suits me completely” - I thought.
I ‘hired’ my wife to help me with the design of the app. Although she almost didn’t have experience to design UI, as a photographer, she definitely can come up with a much better solution than me.
How we built this app is a completely different story, which deserves to be told in detail and I will write about it in the future for sure. Only the story behind the app name deserves a separate article ☺.
To sum up, for a team of two it took about one month and a half to build the app (working in the evenings after work and on weekends) and now we proudly present our ‘child’: Take and Learn, an Android app (for now).
The main application functionality is that you choose:
- your level (beginner, intermediate, advanced)
- a type of verb (regular and irregular)
- tenses to train
and then, you just practice them by typing — as simple as that.
Subjectively, we did a really good job, me, as a not mobile app developer, and my wife, as not a designer — we learned what we need on the fly.
My story
Now, and I’m honest with you, I use the app constantly.
Two weeks ago I studied Pretérito imperfecto de Indivativo and what I changed is that right after I went through the rules and usage of the tense, I took a phone and drilled conjugations for about 15 minutes. When I was comfortable with endings, I switched back to a book (I highly recommend Gramática de uso del español) and strengthen conjugations in my head by doing exercises.
And of course, from time to time I have to come back to the app, especially when more and more tenses settle in my head.
Conclusion
If you also learn Spanish and struggle with tenses as I do, take a shot and I hope the app will help you too.
I’m not planning to monetize it in any foreseen future, so it will stay free.
The app is far away from what I want to have in the end. We’re still currently working on improvements and new features are about to come. So, if you have tips and suggestions, feel free to email us: mslab.takeandlearn@gmail.com.
