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In the book "Fluent Forever" (related blog post here), Wyner suggests using sentences to learn conjugations of verbs. For example, to learn the conjugation of "to be", for each form of the conjugation you'd create a sentence using a specific form, with the word in question being blank on the Anki card's front, and appearing on the back of the card. He also recommends creating distinct sentences for each form. So rather than "I am a teacher", then "You are a teacher", "He is a teacher", he'd recommend something like "I am a teacher", "You are tall", "He is in Brisbane".

The approach makes sense, but I want to make the process a bit more time-efficient.

At the moment, if I want to learn the present indicative of -ar verbs, I have to do the following:

  1. Access a conjugation chart for present indicative -ar
  2. Find six distinct -ar verbs. I currently use https://www.linguasorb.com/spanish/verbs/ar-verbs-list/ for that.
  3. Conjugate the -ar verb to the specific form. For example, "hablar" + 1st person singular "-o" = hablo.
  4. Find an example sentence using the specific form of the specific verb. I use spanishdict for that, such as https://www.spanishdict.com/examples/hablo, so I find "No hablo de dos oficiales, sino de dos jóvenes que han comido bien."
  5. Find a good picture. In this case, I'd probably do an image search for "dos oficiales".
  6. Download a recording of the word "hablo" from forvo. Spanish is a fairly phonetic language as far as reading is concerned, but for me it helps with memorisation.

I'd like to make the process more efficient. Something that would help may be either a resource that not only gives the conjugations but also example sentences for each form of the conjugation. Another thing that would help is a resource where I specify that I want a sentence that has [1st person singular] of the [present indicative] of a [regular -ar verb], and searches for or generates such a sentence.

The team behind the Fluent Forever App is planning to handle grammar, but doesn't currently do so.

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  • Not to nitpick, but "he is in Brisbane" uses estar, not ser. You could use "he is a physician" instead.
    – K Man
    Sep 15, 2019 at 13:38

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