Show HN: Verb Master – A site for practising Spanish verbs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Verb Master – A site for practising Spanish verbs

andycloke.github.io

124 pointsandycloke60 comments

Looks pretty nice.

I actually run a site that does something pretty similar [0]. The major difference is that I "group" verbs into sets with identical conjugations.

I then use spaced repetition to generate the "flashcards", but substitute grouped verbs at random. The idea is for you to get a feel for a conjugation so that when you see a new verb in the future you should have a good sense of how it conjugates. (as a trivial example, if you know how to conjugate tener, you should know how to conjugation detener).

I built it for myself years ago to quickly master all the verb conjugations for all tenses (it takes about 4-6 months), then cleaned it up for others.

I also give a multiple choice option, since on mobile its not always convenient to type.

[0]: https://maestrospanish.com/beta

I actually came across your site a while back and really like it. That method of grouping verbs is very interesting. Thanks for sharing! I definitely need to think about how to group verbs, e.g. by most common and similar stems.

I wanted to avoid multiple choice as I think active recall of the answer is quite important, but I agree it's a trade off as input on mobile for my site feels pretty slow.

I like that idea, but with multiple choice I always can guess the right answer by elimination. I won't learn how to actually use the verbs myself.

I'd set the input to typing by default.

You can change the default in Settings. A 3rd available option is multiple choice, but hide the choices until you click / tap a button to "show options", so you can think of the answer.

I know, I suggest you set the default input method to typing.

First time user will probably now check out the settings, but just try, see that it's multiple choice and leave.

I followed the same flow for learning Spanish as you, and your site looks excellent. I too have a bunch of infinitives memorized via Anki, but would like to practice all forms of conjugation, and manually creating more flashcards is simply too labor-intensive.

One thing I'd like to see is the flashcard interface translated to Spanish. I learned Spanish in Spanish, for the most part, and I get confused when I see "imperfect" and I have to remember that it's really what I learned as "pasado/preterito imperfecto." Built-in pronunciation via TTS would also rock! One could probably write a userscript to do this, but it's always nicer to be built in.

Thanks! I found anki is great for vocab but for verbs there are just so many conjugations that you end up with too many flashcards. Plus making them is a bore as you say...

This is already a feature but maybe it's not clear. Click on the drop down in the top right to change the language to Spanish

I love maestrospanish! Been using it for a few weeks now with great success.

Creator here. I only started learning to code properly 7 months ago and react ~3 months ago, so I'd love any feedback.

I hope to add audio, more tenses and more feedback (on your progress through each round) soon.

I wrote a blog post on the development here for anyone interested: https://andycloke.github.io/Building-Verb-Master/

This was my CS50 final project. Can't recommend the course highly enough.

Very impressive for less than a year's worth of development experience. Appreciate the simple, clean design too. Congratulations on the launch!

How did you load the verbs + conjugations into the system?

Thanks a lot man! Most of the design credit should go to React Toolbox: http://react-toolbox.com

The verb data is from: https://github.com/ghidinelli/fred-jehle-spanish-verbs. I wrote a node script to turn it into a more efficient format.

If you're interested I wrote a little post about making it here: https://andycloke.github.io/Building-Verb-Master/

Looks nice! One thing I saw "Él" is missing the tilde.

Él means he.

Thanks - fixed!

I've been working on learning spanish for a while and this looks super helpful - thanks for creating and sharing it! It would also be sweet if you could add an example of the verb used in a sentence after you've submitted your answer/guess, and then maybe a button to see that example sentence translated back to english. That would be a lot, but just a thought.

I've been using Duolingo to learn German for 3 weeks now, and so far I'm very impressed. They have a long list of languages.

License? This is an excellent UI.

No license.

Imperative (affirmative) for traer seems to have an error. Usted traiga, vosotras traed. You have them switched.

Appears to be an error in the CSV file of the verb database I used. Looking into using the XLS file instead.

Fixed now

Funny, I am Spanish and I just realised how confusing the verb 'to feel' can be.

The app translated it to 'sentirse', and I didn't do it correctly. Just after that I found the error.

'To feel' can be translated to 'sentir' or to 'sentirse' and both are correct depending on the context. 'To feel the wind' would be 'sentir el viento', but 'to feel bad' would be 'sentirse mal'. I conjugated 'sentir' and it was asking for 'sentirse'.

I don't think there is anything special about the verb "sentir". "Sentirse" is just using it in a reflexive way, and the same holds for many other verbs: acostar, cepillar, duchar, levantar, etc.

Was going to say exactly this. Nothing out of the ordinary here. OP appears bilingual but must not spend much time translating between languages. You will face such problems (maybe they can be thought of as an example of an impedence mismatch [0]) whenever going between languages, especially when you're crossing language families.

[0] http://wiki.c2.com/?ImpedanceMismatch

Saber vs. Conocer.

Always had fun with that one in Spanish class.

I think Germanic languages might be the outlier here, every other language that I've encountered uses a distinct verb for "to know (a person)" vs "to know (a fact)". connaitre/savoir (French), gnorizo/xero (Greek), renshi/zhidao (Mandarin).

Or in fact, German kennen/wissen - it's not Germanic languages per se, but English, which developed from a simplified creole spoken by the Saxon conquerors of the Angles (they never bothered with all that conjugation stuff, and it stuck).

Just checked whether Dutch distinguishes between kennen and wissen. It doesn't, exactly like English, same for Norwegian and Swedish. That suggests it's a West Germanic thing.

While English can fairly be described as a creole it's the influence of Norman French on Old English that makes that a fair description. Old English was IIRC on a dialect continuum between Frisian and Norse.

I will always remember the puzzlement of the whole class when my EGB grammar teacher wrote the following sentence in the board for syntactic analysis: Dímelo.

What's so puzzling about that?

Presumably it's the fact that syntactic analysis involves assigning parts of speech and function to tokens, which in English and Spanish are usually words separated by spaces:

  Say  it      to          me
  V  Pronoun Preposition Pronoun
   \/                   \/
   VP                   PP

But "dímelo" is just one word. You need to tokenize it into "dí me lo" before parsing, and presumably that's not immediately obvious to kids.

Another example, this time from formal Portuguese:

    Falar-lhe-ei
    Lit: Tell-him-[I will]

Exactly. Sorry for the level of detail for the non-spanish speakers, but I was on mobile.

Such "onewordness" is not universal, though, it's just usage (as you could see "goal keeper" evolving into "goal-keeper" and then just "goalkeeper")

For example, if you insist on requesting "Dímelo", you might say, "¿Me lo dices?", which, by jumping from exhortation to questioning, splits the word. And in general, although "decirse" and "decirlo" might be treated as infinitive, the verb is actually "decir", and no dictionary will treat them as separate verbs.

Just for the record,

'sentir' is related with outer. You use it to explain that you perceive something that is out of you (like in I feel the wind)

'sentirse' (and other form verbs that fit in "something-something" + se) is related with inner. You use it to explain something about you (i.e your mood). Perceive something inside the limits of your body (like in I feel ill). Is not an exact rule (I feel pain uses sentir for example) but is useful.

Great minds think alike! My friend and I built a similar web app for learning Spanish conjugations: http://practicarapp.herokuapp.com/. I found that it was a perfectly-sized project for learning React/Redux.

Nice work! Yeah couldn't agree more. It really brought home how great Redux is even for smallish projects like these

Looks fun. Congrats on learning React. I haven't wrapped my head around it yet. (But then again, I avoid front-end like the plague...)

I found an "undefined" thing: http://d.pr/i/Dd2eA

Also, the steps aren't really clear. I got "tener - to have" and "Yo", and I put in "tengo" and hit Enter, and it took me back to the main page, where I had to hit "Play" again. I would have expected it to give me another tense or another verb, but that's not what happened.

I tried again by hitting the envelope arrow, but it basically did the same thing.

It's a neat concept (and reminded me that I need to retake Spanish 101) but it could probably use some more documentation and testing. Hope that was helpful!

I had the same experience, including the 'enter somehow takes me back' bug, as well as the undefined thing

That said, I really like the visual design, and I would absolutely find it handy if I could figure out how to play!

This was a bug, Sorry! I'd previously set the target score to 15, but I changed it to 1 whilst debugging something this afternoon. Noob error - Fixed now :)

Edit: Not sure what the undefined bug was will keep looking, ... thanks for flagging it up.

I added the tooltips in the game to explain what to do but I agree it could be more intuitive.

By looking at the first page, Spanish verbs are so similar to Italian and French ones, almost certainly Portuguese and maybe Romanian. I wonder if translating the data file at https://github.com/andycloke/verb-master-development/blob/ma... would be enough to make a similar site for those languages. There are some differences in the pronouns to account for but it's probably a little work on software and a lot of work at building the database.

This is awesome, though there's a bug somewhere that causes any character input into the field to submit. Perhaps triggered by going back and forth to the main menu.

Also it would be useful if you could have a 'hint' mode for the tense so you can remember which one it is. I can never remember the names of the tenses!

EDIT: Seems to be triggered reliably if I get something wrong. Then any character entered into the box will cause it to submit. Quitting and going back resets it.

Thanks! Great shout on the hint mode.

I don't quite understand the bug - could you post steps to recreate? For me submitting a wrong answer shows the conjugation table, then takes you to the next question :/

Perhaps it's a Firefox problem? I'll try it in Safari (EDIT - seems to only trigger in Firefox, so might be a plugin conflict or something weird - probably wouldn't worry too much).

1) Load site, play

2) Get verb wrong - shows the hint table

3) Get to next question, first character entered into the box submits the form (usually incorrectly, of course!)

4) Normal behaviour resumes if I hit quit and play again

Will take a look at this tomorrow - thanks

On a apge liek this [1], the tooltip when mousing pver 'present' is numbered '2.', and the tooltip when mousing over 'hervir - to boil' is '1.', which is the opposite of the order on the page.

[1]: https://andycloke.github.io/verb-master/#/?_k=efs1q4 Whe I mouse-over

Hi cheers for the feedback.

The thinking behind that was that when you on first start it says: '1 - conjugate this verb' '2 - for this person' etc. Which I think is the most logical order.

However I wanted to keep the verb close to the input box so that you can see it close by as you type your answer. That's why the numbers don't follow the order on the page.

I might do this differently in the future - I could maybe get rid of the numbers when you put your mouse over them, but keep them for the initial intro.

Great work!!. Are there any techniques to remember tough Spanish words while practising ?

In case if its English verbs,I am able to see few listed here.

http://learn.groupsone.com/how-to-remember-english-words-for...

Can you help me out with similar techniques for Spanish?

Very cool! It looks like the 3rd person singular and the 2nd person plural forms are swapped throughout the imperative though: "nadad" should be swapped with "nade" in the imperative affirmative, no "pidáis" and "no pidas", etc.

This is great, I'm spanish and I never learned to speak (read pretty well). My conjugation is abysmal so I sound like some kind of backwoods hill billy (the spanish version of that). I may give this a go, get conversational. Great project!

I did this when I was studying Czech - http://conjugate.io

I think I spent more time futzing around with the app instead of learning the language :-D

very nice, congrats! :) I only miss to enter words by pressing Enter instead of clicking on the arrow button

thanks a lot - I forgot to add that to the shortcuts table but have added it now

The Hamburger Menu Icon is also shown on bigger viewports... something you might wanna fix ;)

Thanks - Unfortunately that's just the way the component library (React Toolbox) behaves. I could probably force a 'display: none' or something but I'd rather spend my time adding more feature :)

I have a trip to Spain coming up soon, thanks!

congrats it's very nice!

sweet man really great work. excited to see more languages on this. :)

It's a blank page.

Useful. Thanks, Andy!

this is super cool

Awesome! I have been trying duolingo, but it's kind of a drag and I feel like I never understand verbs well. This is a nice complement!

Also like the nice and clean look. I know I've seen it before somewhere. Where did you get the inspiration for it?

Cheers! The look is all Material Design using the React Toolbox library

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