4 ms·

I remember that when I was first learning Spanish in high school, I found a piece of (Windows) software that pelted you with a series of pairs of an infinitive

I remember that when I was first learning Spanish in high school, I found a piece of (Windows) software that pelted you with a series of pairs of an infinitive and a tense, and you had to conjugate the infinitive accordingly. (Spanish conjugation typically changes the end of the word; irregular verbs tend to involve stem changes). It was fantastic practice and really ingrained the rules; I became a whiz at it. When I started learning Russian, the declensions (like the ones mentioned in the article) really threw me for a loop. I looked all over for a similar app to explain the patterns and drill rote practice, but never found one. While slightly off-topic, does anyone know of such an app (web-based or macOS/iOS)?

leobg 1y ago
https://memrussian.com/ https://memrussian.com/?
- netsharc 1y ago
  Grandfather talks about classical Windows software. On the Play Store this app says "Contains ads - In-app purchases". Ah, as a cheap bastard, I hate how software was pay once back then, and for this one I'm just going to ask you what's the monthly subscription price?
  - mpascale00 1y ago
    This comes up in so many threads here... How can we change the culture of subscriptions back to pay once???
    - necovek 1y ago
      It's not really about the culture anymore. Software that requires maintenance — and most does — has a continuous development cost. As such, subscription is the most natural way to cover it. On the other hand, we have software which has low maintenance cost, but sold for peanuts ($0-$10) in small quantities, so authors try to introduce alternative revenue streams. As in, it's fair to pay continuously (subscription) for continuous work (maintenance), so I don't expect that to go away. Ads, though, yuck...
      - sneak 1y ago
        Software sold today does not require maintenance. Software to work in the future requires maintenance. I am not buying future software. I am buying today software. Increasingly I am not buying software at all.
        perching_aix 1y ago
        This is a good argument in favor of subscriptions not being mandatory, but not in favor of the abolishment of subscriptions overall, which is what they were talking about.
        3036e4 1y ago
        That is the old way. You bought some application and it came with upgrades until next major version release or similar. Then when that release came out you could decide to pay again or just keep using the old (now unsupported) version you already paid for. That solved all the issues with paying for maintenance, but sadly someone must have figured out a mandatory subscription was a better way to make more money.
        johannes1234321 1y ago
        It's not only a way to make more money, but it also matches better to modern development approaches. Major versions come from a time where one had to produce physical media. Thus one could do a major release only every few years. Back then features had to be grouped together in a big bang release. Nowadays one can ship features as they are being developed, with many small features changes all the time.
        3036e4 1y ago
        That was probably true a long time ago, but I bought software using that model that did not have any physical releases and at least one had frequent minor releases adding new features. It seems to me like the "subscription model" is exactly the same, except for the use of DRM and cloud dependencies to force users to pay for new versions. The only thing that changed was that the option to remain on an old version was taken away from users.
    - sgarland 1y ago
      Given how profitable it is, I doubt it’ll be changed. That said, I very much like Codeweavers’ approach [0], which IMO is the modern equivalent to purchasing software on a physical medium: you buy it, you can re-download it as many times as you’d like, install it on as many machines as you’d like (single-user usage only), and you get 1 year of updates and support. After that, you can still keep using it indefinitely, but you don’t get updates or paid support. You get a discount if you renew before expiry. They also have a lifetime option which, so far, they’ve not indicated they’re going to change. I have no affiliation with them, I just think it’s a good product, and a good licensing / sales model. [0]: https://www.codeweavers.com/store https://www.codeweavers.com/store
      - mpascale00 1y ago
        Profitable for sure, but I'm often half surprised by the lack of competition against subscription-based everything these days.
  - GuB-42 1y ago
    I don't know about this app but many of the "Contains ads - In-app purchases" apps offer to remove the ads for a one-time payment.
  - nsksl 1y ago
    Find a pirate version if possible…
yorwba 1y ago
You might be able to build something similar yourself using declension data extracted from Wiktionary using wiktextract: https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract#pre-extracted-data https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract#pre-extracted-data
jeffwass 1y ago
When I was learning Spanish (on my own) 25 years ago I had a Spanish/English dictionary. It only translated verbs to Spanish infinitive, but each had a numerical index mapping it to a class of verbs with the same conjugation pattern. There was a section at the front of the dictionary with full conjugation patterns over all tenses for one sample verb in each class. Eg, each type of stem-changing verb fell into one index, full irregulars were singletons in their own class, some irregulars that behave similarly (iirc tener and detener) shared one class. So all verbs in Spanish fell neatly into a few dozen unique patterns, and the indexing was already done. I was going to build a quiz software just like you mentioned to conjugate any verb in any tense, but “never got around to it”. I wonder how the reverse-string trie pattern in the article would be for reconstructing the class mapping.
kashunstva 1y ago
> … learning Russian… explain the patterns… such an app Non-native Russian speaker here. In the past, I cobbled together some scripts that use the spaCy Python module with the larger of the two Russian modules to provide context-aware lemmatization and grammatical tag extraction. On the whole, though, my biggest gains in Russian were in letting go of the need to analytically deconstruct the inflections and instead build up a mental library of patterns (and exceptions) in my head through use. EDIT: I mean context within a sentence, not a broader meaning.
Rendello 1y ago
There's some Anki (flashcard) decks that use the "KOFI" method: > KOFI (Konjugation First) is the name I've given to a provocative language-learning approach I've created: to learn all the forms of a language's conjugation before even starting to formally study the language I used the French one, years after I learned French, because my conjugation was abysmal. You can get by using basic tenses or wrong tenses, and people will understand you, but it's not what you want. The KOFI method is supposed to teach you all the conjugation patterns in a matter of months before learning the language, I'd like to give it a try in-earnest some day for a new language. My interest in French has waned so I didn't stick with it. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1131659186 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1131659186
gametorch 1y ago
I used Clozemaster effectively to learn Russian. It's not exactly what out describe, but you can fly through many "clozes" to ingrain the patterns into your brain.
jdcarr 1y ago
I use ConjuGato on iOS for practicing Spanish conjugations. There’s a game mode where you’re given an infinitive/tense/person and think of the conjugation and you can filter it down to solely irregular verbs to learn the exceptions
LoneGeek 1y ago
If you can read Russian, there is a Python app for morphological analysis called pymorphy3. Documentation: https://pymorphy2.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://pymorphy2.readthedocs.io/en/stable/. It is based on an OpenCorpora dictionary: https://opencorpora.org/dict.php https://opencorpora.org/dict.php This dictionary is based on a Zaliznyak dictionary, which is always referenced in Wiktionary's articles.
wchar_t 1y ago
Do you happen to still have a link to this software?
1-more 1y ago
I had an idea for a flash card generator for Russian that would do preposition + adjective + noun to get faster at declining in my head; I had done Latin before that and no one expects you to do Latin declension quickly (unless you're a monk maybe?). Never went anywhere with it, naturally.

leobg 1y ago

https://memrussian.com/ https://memrussian.com/?

netsharc 1y ago
Grandfather talks about classical Windows software. On the Play Store this app says "Contains ads - In-app purchases". Ah, as a cheap bastard, I hate how software was pay once back then, and for this one I'm just going to ask you what's the monthly subscription price?
- mpascale00 1y ago
  This comes up in so many threads here... How can we change the culture of subscriptions back to pay once???
  - necovek 1y ago
    It's not really about the culture anymore. Software that requires maintenance — and most does — has a continuous development cost. As such, subscription is the most natural way to cover it. On the other hand, we have software which has low maintenance cost, but sold for peanuts ($0-$10) in small quantities, so authors try to introduce alternative revenue streams. As in, it's fair to pay continuously (subscription) for continuous work (maintenance), so I don't expect that to go away. Ads, though, yuck...
    - sneak 1y ago
      Software sold today does not require maintenance. Software to work in the future requires maintenance. I am not buying future software. I am buying today software. Increasingly I am not buying software at all.
      - perching_aix 1y ago
        This is a good argument in favor of subscriptions not being mandatory, but not in favor of the abolishment of subscriptions overall, which is what they were talking about.
        3036e4 1y ago
        That is the old way. You bought some application and it came with upgrades until next major version release or similar. Then when that release came out you could decide to pay again or just keep using the old (now unsupported) version you already paid for. That solved all the issues with paying for maintenance, but sadly someone must have figured out a mandatory subscription was a better way to make more money.
        johannes1234321 1y ago
        It's not only a way to make more money, but it also matches better to modern development approaches. Major versions come from a time where one had to produce physical media. Thus one could do a major release only every few years. Back then features had to be grouped together in a big bang release. Nowadays one can ship features as they are being developed, with many small features changes all the time.
        3036e4 1y ago
        That was probably true a long time ago, but I bought software using that model that did not have any physical releases and at least one had frequent minor releases adding new features. It seems to me like the "subscription model" is exactly the same, except for the use of DRM and cloud dependencies to force users to pay for new versions. The only thing that changed was that the option to remain on an old version was taken away from users.
  - sgarland 1y ago
    Given how profitable it is, I doubt it’ll be changed. That said, I very much like Codeweavers’ approach [0], which IMO is the modern equivalent to purchasing software on a physical medium: you buy it, you can re-download it as many times as you’d like, install it on as many machines as you’d like (single-user usage only), and you get 1 year of updates and support. After that, you can still keep using it indefinitely, but you don’t get updates or paid support. You get a discount if you renew before expiry. They also have a lifetime option which, so far, they’ve not indicated they’re going to change. I have no affiliation with them, I just think it’s a good product, and a good licensing / sales model. [0]: https://www.codeweavers.com/store https://www.codeweavers.com/store
    - mpascale00 1y ago
      Profitable for sure, but I'm often half surprised by the lack of competition against subscription-based everything these days.
- GuB-42 1y ago
  I don't know about this app but many of the "Contains ads - In-app purchases" apps offer to remove the ads for a one-time payment.
- nsksl 1y ago
  Find a pirate version if possible…

yorwba 1y ago

You might be able to build something similar yourself using declension data extracted from Wiktionary using wiktextract: https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract#pre-extracted-data https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract#pre-extracted-data

jeffwass 1y ago

When I was learning Spanish (on my own) 25 years ago I had a Spanish/English dictionary. It only translated verbs to Spanish infinitive, but each had a numerical index mapping it to a class of verbs with the same conjugation pattern. There was a section at the front of the dictionary with full conjugation patterns over all tenses for one sample verb in each class. Eg, each type of stem-changing verb fell into one index, full irregulars were singletons in their own class, some irregulars that behave similarly (iirc tener and detener) shared one class. So all verbs in Spanish fell neatly into a few dozen unique patterns, and the indexing was already done. I was going to build a quiz software just like you mentioned to conjugate any verb in any tense, but “never got around to it”. I wonder how the reverse-string trie pattern in the article would be for reconstructing the class mapping.

kashunstva 1y ago

> … learning Russian… explain the patterns… such an app Non-native Russian speaker here. In the past, I cobbled together some scripts that use the spaCy Python module with the larger of the two Russian modules to provide context-aware lemmatization and grammatical tag extraction. On the whole, though, my biggest gains in Russian were in letting go of the need to analytically deconstruct the inflections and instead build up a mental library of patterns (and exceptions) in my head through use. EDIT: I mean context within a sentence, not a broader meaning.

Rendello 1y ago

There's some Anki (flashcard) decks that use the "KOFI" method: > KOFI (Konjugation First) is the name I've given to a provocative language-learning approach I've created: to learn all the forms of a language's conjugation before even starting to formally study the language I used the French one, years after I learned French, because my conjugation was abysmal. You can get by using basic tenses or wrong tenses, and people will understand you, but it's not what you want. The KOFI method is supposed to teach you all the conjugation patterns in a matter of months before learning the language, I'd like to give it a try in-earnest some day for a new language. My interest in French has waned so I didn't stick with it. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1131659186 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1131659186

gametorch 1y ago

I used Clozemaster effectively to learn Russian. It's not exactly what out describe, but you can fly through many "clozes" to ingrain the patterns into your brain.

jdcarr 1y ago

I use ConjuGato on iOS for practicing Spanish conjugations. There’s a game mode where you’re given an infinitive/tense/person and think of the conjugation and you can filter it down to solely irregular verbs to learn the exceptions

LoneGeek 1y ago

If you can read Russian, there is a Python app for morphological analysis called pymorphy3. Documentation: https://pymorphy2.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://pymorphy2.readthedocs.io/en/stable/. It is based on an OpenCorpora dictionary: https://opencorpora.org/dict.php https://opencorpora.org/dict.php This dictionary is based on a Zaliznyak dictionary, which is always referenced in Wiktionary's articles.

wchar_t 1y ago

Do you happen to still have a link to this software?

1-more 1y ago

I had an idea for a flash card generator for Russian that would do preposition + adjective + noun to get faster at declining in my head; I had done Latin before that and no one expects you to do Latin declension quickly (unless you're a monk maybe?). Never went anywhere with it, naturally.