May 26, 2010

Who Decided 1001 Spanish Verbs is the Ideal Number?

1001 Spanish verbs was a software program that you could download to your home computer quite cheaply that gave the full conjugation for 1001 verbs in the 12 most used Spanish tenses. Unfortunately, it is hard to locate this download for the personal computer today and it now seems to be available for downloads to mobiles only. Although, I may be wrong!

However, the question you should be asking is if you actually need a program, or book, that offers the complete conjugation for 1001 verbs?

The simple answer to this question is ‘no’ and I shall explain why. You probably already know that there are many thousands of verbs in Spanish that are classed as regular, these verbs fall into 3 specific groups. These three groups are comprised of verbs that end in either, -er, -ir or -ar.

Regular verbs are called ‘regular’ because they use exactly the same Spanish verb conjugation formation as other verbs that use the same ending, this means you would only really require a complete list of regular verbs and a lone full conjugation sheet for each verb group so that you could find the required conjugation.

The trouble being is that with Spanish, as it is with most other languages, are the great number of irregular Spanish verbs …over two thousand to put a figure on it! This can strike panic in the mind of a Spanish language student especially as learning the conjugations of irregular Spanish verbs is deemed the most difficult area of study when learning the language.

Two thousand seems an awfully large number of verbs with irregularities to learn and if you had to learn each one it would be, without question, but when you consider first of all, that a lot of these verbs will be very rarely used, if at all, and also that these 2000 plus verbs can be further broken down into sixty-six, or so, different variations of irregular patterns and the job appears much more doable!

So to recap…3 regular patterns of conjugation plus 66 irregular patterns of conjugation, combined that is 69 varying conjugation patterns if my calculation is correct which is a great deal less than the 1001 Spanish verbs of the title. Because this is the case, it goes without thinking that all that is therefore needed are the conjugation patterns for the 69 verbs and complete lists that contain the regular -ar,-er and -ir verbs and each irregular verb for every irregularity.

However, having been shown the true number of different conjugation patterns in Spanish the biggest issue that most, if not all, Spanish language students face is that of actually learning these verb conjugations. Having all the verb sheets you will ever require is great but unless you have an affective method of studying them you will still have major problems. For a long time the only way to learn verbs was to recite and recite some more until you had them etched into your frontal lob…very tedious and boring, not to mention time consuming!

Nowadays, it can be a whole lot easier to study verb conjugation by using a revolutionary new software program that not only focuses the mind on specific problem areas but does so without the student becoming bored too quickly and the results are astounding too with many users have reported excellent results succeeding where they previously failed. This revolutionary verb training software is called verbarrator and it demotes verb books and other verb conjugators to being only required as study tools for reference only!

My advice would be, in particular those of you who are having trouble learning the conjugation of Spanish verbs, to check out the verbarrator software program when you get the chance.