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

andycloke.github.io

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

#41

Post by Ma8ee »

abarrettjo wrote: post #40
andycloke wrote: post #7

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.

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.

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

#42

Post by barry-cotter »

Vivtek wrote: post #20
titanomachy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#43

Post by tomcam »

andycloke wrote: post #7

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.

License? This is an excellent UI.

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

#44

Post by vbrhjajcn »

andycloke wrote: post #7

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.

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

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

#45

Post by nandemo »

kmicklas wrote: post #19
harperlee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

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

#46

Post by andycloke »

vbrhjajcn wrote: post #44
andycloke wrote: post #7

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.

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.

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

#47

Post by harperlee »

nandemo wrote: post #45
kmicklas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Portugue…

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.

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

#48

Post by kutkloon7 »

dharmon wrote: post #29

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 t…

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.

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

#49

Post by pmontra »

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.
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