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Comment by dharmon | Hacker News Reader

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

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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 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.

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.

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