A quick update on the last days - it has been basically all about verb forms...
I studied all past tenses in all languages, including the not so often used. Yesterday I worked on future tense, conditional, personal infinitive and gerund in Portuguese. That's what I I still need to study for the remaining languages this week, before I'll leave for another week of vacation on Sunday. Additionally I studied relative pronouns and more about object pronouns in Portuguese.
How do I learn verb forms? I used to sit down and study verb forms by heart and do a lot of exercises in the past. I leave that aside now because I find those exercises boring. A few months ago I started integrating conjugation into my vocabulary training, first with paper cards, now with Anki and, of course, an Excel table. I'll post more details about it soon, but here is a quick summary:
I created a verb list in Excel for each language, in which I enter verbs and conjugate them into all tenses. Whenever I learn a new tense, I have a look how to form it in general and which exceptions exist. Then I go through the whole list, take each verb and set it into the new tense. It's a good practise plus I complete my verb list step-by-step. This table I copy into the corresponding Anki card, so whenever I revise a verb I also revise the conjugation.
As you can see on the picture, I also use a special colour system for irregularities, what makes them easier for me to remember and recognize.
In addition to the theoretical part, I've played a lot on Duolingo. I'm highly motivated as I'm playing against my friend Anna, and I'm in the lead :-)
I haven't read as much as I wanted, but I'm sure I'll catch up next week on the beach. I've got some more bilingual books from the library and I'm going to prepare some Wikipedia-articles for my kindle. (In case you haven't done yet, read more about learning with Wikipedia-arcticles.)
This is a good chance to introduce some decent advertising on my blog via affiliate links: The Amazon Kindle is currently available for EUR 49 in the Amazon.de-Shop --> that's the Kindle I use and I personally recommend for everybody but especially for language learners. It's very easy to get literature in foreign languages (especially in my project languages Spanish/French/Italian/Portuguese) and at a reasonable price.
I'm looking forward to learning some more verb forms what hopefully enables me understand more from the books I'd love to read during vacation :-)
When you are on holidays next week I am certainly going to catch up on Duolingo!!! ;-)
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