Verbs and Conjugation
In class, your teacher explains a new tense. At home, you need to drill the forms until you know them: je suis, tu es, il est. The Verbs tab does that for every verb in your deck. Each verb gets its full conjugation table, and you practise it tense by tense, by hand or on the keyboard, until every form sits.
Which languages? The Verbs tab appears in decks whose target language is French, Spanish, German, Italian, Bulgarian or Latin. Learning English? English verbs are practised with Verb Forms instead (go, went, gone).
The Verbs tab
Open a deck. Next to Practicing, Mastered and Exercises you will find Verbs, with the number of verbs in the deck. Every word in the deck that is a verb appears here. A reflexive verb such as se lever is its own entry, next to lever.
The list shows the tense you are practising, for example présent, in a pill next to the heading. Each verb has a row with its translation, an irregular badge where it applies, and one dot for each person:
- a green dot -- you know this form;
- an orange dot -- you do not know it yet.
Verbs you know in every person move from To learn to Learned in présent (or whichever tense you are on), with a green check.
If the deck has no verbs yet, the tab says so. Add words, or scan a page with verbs on it, and they appear here.
See and hear all forms
Tap a verb to open its table. Every form is listed with its person. In regular verbs, the stem is grey and the ending orange, so the pattern is easy to see.
Tap the speaker next to a form to hear it, or tap Play all to hear the whole table. Tap the tense at the top to look at another tense. To practise only this verb, tap Practise with the verb's name at the bottom, for example Practise être.
Choosing the tense
Tap the tense pill to choose what to practise. The tenses are grouped into Present, Past, Future and Moods. Less common tenses are under More. Each tense shows an example, what it is used for, and how many of your verbs you have learned in it.
The app remembers your tense for each language. When you have learned most of your verbs in one tense, a card suggests the next one: Start switches to it, Not now hides the suggestion for a few days.
Some tenses start with a short reminder card the first time you choose them, for example: Passé composé = avoir or être + participle. It reminds you of the pattern you learned in class and tells you what to write. Tap Got it to close it.
Practising
Tap the Conjugate button at the bottom of the tab, for example Conjugate 5 verbs. A session takes up to 5 verbs, starting with the ones you have not learned yet.
For each verb you see its table with the forms you still need to learn. The cell you are on has an orange outline:
- Write the form for the person shown, by keyboard or by hand. Switch between the two with the input button.
- Tap Check Answer. A right form turns green. A wrong form shows the correct one, with the wrong letters marked, and you write it again.
- Stuck? The lightbulb opens all forms. A form you write after looking turns yellow: it counts as practised, but not as known.
After each verb you see how many forms you got right, and the stem and endings of the verb. Then tap Next verb. At the end, the summary shows each verb with its score. Practise the mistakes again repeats only the forms that needed help.
What to write
- Whole forms. In compound tenses, write the helper verb and the participle: ai parlé, suis allé, he comido, habe gespielt. For the German Futur I, write werde and the infinitive.
- Reflexive verbs with their pronoun: me lève, te levantas, mi lavo, and in German after the verb: wasche mich, merke mir.
- Bulgarian forms with their particle: ще чета, да чета.
- Accents count. étes is not êtes. Spaces, hyphens and the kind of apostrophe do not count, so m'appelle and m’appelle are both right.
- Other correct spellings are accepted, for example both spellings of the French 1990 reform (préfèrerai and préférerai).
If you write the right participle with the wrong helper verb, the app tells you which helper the verb takes.
When a form counts as known
A form counts as known after you write it right 3 times in a row at the first try. A mistake, or looking at the forms first, starts the count again. A verb is learned in a tense when you know every person.
Your progress belongs to the verb, not to the deck. If être is in two of your decks, what you learned in one counts in the other.
Review
Forms you have practised but do not know yet, and forms you have not seen for a week, come back in a Review round. When there are forms to review, a Review card appears at the top of the tab. A review mixes verbs and tenses, one form per screen, with the weakest forms first.
Latin: verbs and nouns
In a Latin deck the tab is called Grammar, and a switch at the top changes between Verbs and Nouns.
- Verbs work as described above, with the Latin tenses: Praesens, Imperfectum, Futurum I, Perfectum, Plusquamperfectum and Futurum II, and under More the Coniunctivus, the Imperativus and the passive tenses. Every Latin form is one word or a fixed pair (amātus sum), with no separate helper to choose.
- Nouns have one table, the Declinatio, with Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative and Ablative in the singular and the plural. Tap Decline (for example Decline 5 nouns) to practise.
- Macrons are optional. amō and amo are both right.
- A word stored with its principal parts (amāre, amō, amāvī, amātum) is matched by its infinitive.
Latin has no voice in the app, so the speaker buttons do not appear.
What it costs
- The demo deck is always free. Practise all its verbs as often as you like.
- On the free plan, you can practise 3 verbs from your own decks. A verb counts once you start its table, and it stays free after that.
- With a subscription, every verb is included.
When your free verbs are used, the Conjugate button shows a lock, and tapping it shows the Plus options. See Settings and Account for the plans.