There’s actually a beautiful idea at the heart of the Spanish verb system! It has to do with the relationship between present indicative and subjunctive.
A beautiful ideaīut it’s not just that the patterns make learning easier. Yes, you could absorb these patterns gradually over time, in context but it becomes surprisingly easy when you become aware of the patterns. And the remainder-imperative, preterite, future-are more complex variations on the same basic pattern. Indicative imperfect, conditional, and both present and imperfect subjunctive are simple variations on present tense. And it’s actually pretty fascinating.įirst of all, you realize that-for regular tenses- once you master present tense, most of the others are a piece of cake. You develop an understanding of how the different moods and tenses relate to each other. One of the things that conjugation drills do is give you an overview of the whole verb system. That alone feels like a big step in the right direction. I’ve encountered it enough to be scared by it, but not enough to have any kind of feel for it.īut now that I’m totally comfortable with the form-which is so simple and regular-it’s much less intimidating. The drills gave me that.Īt the other end of the spectrum, it feels so good to demystify an “exotic” form such as the imperfect subjunctive. Despite my familiarity with present tense, I didn’t have complete command of it. But it’s very satisfying to take what you already know and truly master it. You might think I started with the verb forms I was having a problem with. That’s the point at which I really had a reason to want to know them better.Īnd since I already knew quite a few verbs and had a decent command of present tense, the drills were much more meaningful for me. The less familiar forms were occurring more and more, but still not often enough to provide consistent practice. It felt ok … but I was regularly running into places where I wasn’t confident. For me, it became increasingly difficult to handle them all intuitively, just from context. Almost half the verbs you’re encountering are not present tense, with significant numbers of preterite, imperative, imperfect and present subjunctive. With this distribution, it’s pretty easy to absorb them from context.īut by the time you reach the intermediate levels, present indicative has dropped to 60%. I dug into our stats, and it turns out that at the beginner level, more than 80% of the verbs are present indicative 9% are imperative (mostly disculpe and ne se preocupa), 7% are preterite, with just a smattering of other verb forms. I recently reached intermediate level in SuperCoco, which means I’d learned about two hundred conversations (about 4,500 sentences). No doubt the first key to loving conjugation drills was waiting until I really felt the need.
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