Some people may have heard that there are just 25 irregular Spanish verbs, give or take the odd one or two, However, I’m sorry to tell you this, but the number of twenty five is a little off target! There are, in fact, actually well over two thousand irregular verbs!
Thankfully, a large number of these irregular verbs are quite obscure and will not be needed all that often, which means that memorizing them is not all that important for most students. Although, you will still need to learn more than the twenty five, or so, verbs, so often quoted by those misleading sources.
Of the irregular verbs that you will definitely need to master, there are a number that it will be an absolute necessity to have an extremely good understanding of. Unfortunately, many of these verbs are, as is so often the case, also the most irregular in the Spanish language and this is why so many students find that mastering them is an obstacle that they just cannot get past and because of this give up learning Spanish before they even get going, the obvious solution to this problem is to make learning verbs much easier and much more enjoyable…but is this achievable?
The age old method of learning irregular verbs was to use a verb conjugation book that contained verb tables that were read repeatedly until the verb formations were memorized. I am guessing that many of you can remember reciting verb conjugation, in unison with the rest of your class repeatedly when you were at school…I know I do, it was the most boring and arduous part of learning a language and something that pretty much put me off learning languages for life! Problem was, there were few options until, that is, the computer age dawned!
The increase in ownership of home computers accompanied by easy internet access has meant that studying Spanish has become much more accessible for the normal person and, dare I say it, easier too. It is pretty easy nowadays to be able to locate free learning materials and affordable downloadable courseware previously not available for most people. However, it hasn’t been until relatively recently that any real attempt was being made by designers of software on developing verb conjugation programs that would make the hard and challenging task of learning Spanish verbs any easier.
There have been quite a number of free verb conjugation programs and verb tables available online for a while now, but a lot of them were basically digital versions of what was already available in a printed format and they did little, if anything, to improve either the education of, or the fun level of the individual other than to provide them with a certain uniqueness for a short time. The problem facing programers was always going to be how they could make improvements without changing what needed to be learnt. Basically, they had to re-invent the wheel.
Since developers could not, in any way, change the information that needed to be passed on to the software user they would therefore need to think of ways of improving how it was studied. Their objectives would be quite simple:
- Develop software that would make learning Spanish verb conjugation easier
- Make learning verbs much more enjoyable.
- And…as a result of the first 2 points, their 3rd objective of lessening the time it takes to learn Spanish would automatically be achieved.
Software that could match these 3 criteria would completely revolutionize how people learn Spanish verbs, thankfully, there have been programs released recently that do just that so if you need to improve your study of Spanish verbs or are just looking at learning Spanish sooner it is an absolute necessity to check these software programs out.
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