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Transcript: Hi, there, Steve Kaufmann, I’m back from Palm Springs. I’m back here in Vancouver and I’m going to be working out of my tower, call it Montaigne's Tower. This is the top floor here of our house. You can’t see the nice wooden beams, although I could show them to you. I’m going to talk about Spanish verbs and for romance languages I think verbs are the biggest bugbear. So I kind of looked around at what I had in my room here and I just happen to have a book called Portuguese Verbs. You look in it, you know, commands, imperatives, affirmative, imperative verbs ending in this, that and the other, pages and pages of irregular verbs, conjunctions, verbs expressing desire, doubt and volition. I mean it’s very intimidating and all those different endings.
Having spent a lot of time trying to learn verb tables, I’m convinced that it can’t be done. At the very best, you can have a book like this on Spanish verbs and keep it in your bathroom to leaf through while you’re on the john, but it’s impossible to memorize, in my opinion. What should you do? Again, I poked into LingQ, because I haven’t been studying Spanish recently at LingQ, saved a few verbs and, low and behold, amongst the dictionaries we have access to is one called SpanishDict.com and it’s amazing. You open any verb up and you will see the conjugation, you will see examples, you’ll see a little video and, of course, you’ll see the meaning.
If you do enough reading in Spanish, enough listening, if you’re attentive to the language, if you occasionally review this kind of explanation, but rely largely on the fact that repeated exposure, particularly in different contexts, is eventually going to enable you to get that natural sense for Spanish verbs then you can master Spanish verbs. I shouldn’t use the word ‘master’ because I don’t believe that’s a word that applies in language learning, but the more familiar you become with Spanish verbs, the better your Spanish will become. You won’t have to worry as you to go use a verb what the form of the third-person singular past tense is and so forth, it will start to come out naturally.
So my advice on Spanish verbs is lots of reading and listening and if you happen to be at LingQ, select SpanishDict as your dictionary of choice. Even if you get a quick explanation of the verb via our User Hints or via Google Translate, open up SpanishDict and every time you come across a verb quickly review the different conjugation endings, but don’t try to memorize it, then go back to enjoying whatever content you’re reading and, of course, listen to it.
I hope that’s helpful, bye for now.