I’m becoming more and more of a fan of using flash card programs, as I’ve been using VTrain long enough now ( a few weeks) to notice that I’m remembering things I tended to forget before.
So I decided to tackle past tense verbs with the help of flash cards. It’s been working great. I’m just working with the two main past tenses, the ones you would use to say, for example, “We ate at the new new restaurant last night” or “We were eating when….”
In Spanish, these tenses are the preterit and the imperfect. The preterit is irregular for many verbs, so I have years of experience in messing it up. The imperfect is easier but I needed some review.
I had these verb conjugations on my refrigerator door, and that helped some, but mainly I think it showed me that more serious study was called for. Things on the refrigerator begin to seem like part of the background very fast!
So then, it was time to bring out the big guns: flash cards on the computer. (See the category for Flash Cards for reviews and tips on flash cards.)
At first, I just put the verbs by themselves into my program, One side might say “they talked,” and the other side would be hablaron. Or one side might be “they were talking” and the other would be hablaban.
But lately I’ve made it more interesting and a way to learn more vocabulary at the same time. I use phrases or sentences with some context, like this:
” He spoke Spanish fluently.” Habló español con soltura.
“They used to talk behind everyone’s backs.” Hablaban a espaldas de todo el mundo.
So where do I get these handy sentences since I’m adding other words or expressions I don’t know? From two places:
- One is an excellent verb book I got from Amazon, The Big Red Book of Spanish Verbs with CD-ROM. The link takes you to Amazon.
- The other is a very handy free website, WordReference, which is an online dictionary.
Of course, there are any number of other sources: books you have, other websites, etc.
Maybe this approach will be useful to you, in some way, at whatever level of Spanish you are currently at. Learning sentences is easier than single words, it seems to me, because of the context, and also because of the sound of the words as we repeat them out loud. And I’ve learned one extra lesson: I won’t go talking a espaldas de todo el mundo.
