The Verb Blitz Adage : Keep It Simple

They say it’s best to keep things simple. And so it is with the Verb Blitz apps.

Verb Blitz, if you missed it, is a solid, old-school reference and drill tool to practise verb conjugations. I created the first over a decade a go as a nerdy hobby project in machine morphology, and it’s now available in 23 languages. Originally intended as a support for my own learning, it’s now helping lots of other learners grapple with endings, stem changes, and all other manner of verb fiendishness.

It was definitely high time for updates. The original apps were developed in XCode with Objective-C and storyboards, which are now very much ‘the old’. Since then, Swift and SwiftUI have become the smart new kids on the block for all things Apple. The longer you leave things, the harder it is to catch up, so a conversion project was as much about up-skilling myself as keeping the apps functional and easily updateable.

A screenshot of Verb Blitz for Scottish Gaelic.

Reining It In

The thing to guard against is that overzealous rush you get when you start a new project. It has a lot in common with the euphoric optimism polyglots get when they start a new language. After a handful of words, we’re promising ourselves that we’ll reach C1 within a year, that’s we’ll commit large swathes of each day to linguistic endeavours. Time and other commitments get in the way, and overpromising can sometimes dent our motivation a little.

For that reason, I found myself having to rein it in a little with the new, fresh Verb Blitz apps. I have a lot of exciting ideas for further developments, but to let them take over would be to jeopardise updating the existing functionality in good time. The fact is that by focusing on getting the foundations right – the existing activities – I take care of the urgent needs first, and have lots of time later to do the more fun stuff.

Isn’t that just like learning a language? It can be so tempting to skip the boring introductory units, and head straight to the meaty chapters of a new course book. I feel that urge with every new language project I start. But it’s definitely worth reining it in. Deal with the urgent needs first – basic communication – and then all the fancy bells and whistles can come later, when you’re up and running.

It’s a nice reminder of the importance of sobriety and moderation in project management. Once again, good learning strategy seems to have a lot of touching points with well-planned tech development. Not least the oft-forgotten advice when setting out: first and foremost, keep it simple!

The Turkish flag. Image from freeimages.com

A Foray into Turkish Verbs

This week, Turkish fell into my lap, quite unexpectedly. Not another one! I hear you cry. Well, not quite.

Here’s the deal. One of my favourite things about developing language resources as a career is the variety. Languages that I probably wouldn’t ever have thought to study land in front of me, and just by working with them, I get the chance to learn about them (if not quite to speak them all).

As it happens, I’ve been working on a Turkish verb drill app lately. Geek fess: automated language learning practice based on morphology models is a nerdy passion of mine. If you build an accurate linguistic model as a digital object, you can manipulate it to create myriad, virtually inexhaustible testing options. That approach fits particularly well with verb conjugations with all their paradigms and permutations.

Second geek fess: if it’s possible to have a most beloved part of speech, the verb is mine. No, I can’t believeI have a favourite part of speech, either.)

In any case, if you’re making these models, you have to understand them first. To start with, I will usually grab a bunch of grammar primers, as well as consult Wiktionary and other online resources like the excellent Turkish Text Book for explained examples to base a program on. The side-effect is that I’ll become unintentionally familiar with language systems I’m not actively learning, which is both a not-particularly-useful gift, as well as a source of linguistic fascination.

And Turkish is quite an interesting one, as far as verbs are concerned.

As Regular As A Turkish Verb

The first thing is the regularity. Pretty much everybody makes this remark; in my searches, I repeatedly came across the seemingly wild claim that there are no irregular verbs in Turkish.

Well, as shocking as it is to someone used to ‘school languages’, this claim appears to be more or less accurate. Verb after verb, tense after tense, there is very little that is completely unexpected. The alternations that you do find are often explained away phonologically, too. For instance, the -t- in the root git- (from gitmek, to go), can become voiced intervocalically in some tenses, like gidiyorum (I am going).

There is one aspect you could compare to Indo-European verb irregularities, which is a handful of verbs with an extended aorist root (vermek, to give, for example, has the aorist root verir- rather than the expected ver-). But it’s nothing compared to the verb table headaches we had in French, German and Spanish.

Just What Are You Inferring?!

The other striking difference from languages I’m more familiar with is the inferential mood. This relates to reporting events that were not necessarily witnessed or experienced, and it’s not something that the Indo-European biggies tend to indicate now; perhaps the closest is the subjunctive of reported speech in German. In his book Dying Words, Nicholas Evans explores  several languages that have these kinds of hearsay features in their verb systems, and they’re all off the beaten, mainstream path. That said, Balkan languages – possibly via contact with Turkish? – have developed ways of expressing it too.

Anyway, bundling that into mood and tense allows Turkish to express some very nuanced situations very succinctly. Take this example from Fluent In Turkish:

almak (to buy)
almiş (I heard that s/he bought)

How nifty is that? If you ever wondered whether it was possible to feel envy over a language having a particular tense, there’s your answer.

Although I’m not learning Turkish, I am learning about it – and loving it. And if all we take away from these brief forays is an appreciation of how other languages do stuff differently, we’re still all the richer for it.

Creating language learning resources with a bit of translation magic!

In a rut with resources? Create, create, create!

Do you ever tire of using the same old resources again and again? Or maybe you just can’t seem to hit upon exactly the right resources to switch you on.

Maybe all you need is a bit of DIY.

I was feeling the drag with Duolingo of late. As much as I love the onerous owl, it was all getting a little repetitive. The addictive pressure of leagues added to the more-of-the-same platform fatigue. Not wanting to go cold turkey (I still find it a wonderful way to learn and practise), I scaled back a little.

Predictably, the move left an owl-sized hole in my heart at first. Yes! I even missed that frenzied, everyday point-piling practice. But most of all, I missed Duolingo’s translation method of learning, something that really works for me.

Waiting for the owl…

So I started wondering how I could bring some of that same magic to my learning in different ways – and maybe even extend it to my languages without a Duolingo offering yet, like Icelandic and Gaelic. “Waiting for Duolingo” has become something of a phenomenon amongst the language learning community, summed up in one spot-on tweet I came across recently:

https://twitter.com/ohnonero/status/1181996626094825472?s=20

Admittedly, I can see both sides of the argument here. One the one hand, there is a wealth of learning materials available. It certainly does seem a limiting shame to focus on a single one.

But on the flip side, a lot of people get a lot of joy and benefit from the ease of the Duolingo format.

The solution? Recreate those methods that work best for you, but in your own resources!

Method in the madness

First of all, I should explain what it is I like so much about the Duolingo method. There is actually something very traditional about the way the platform presents and drills foreign language material. In fact, it has a lot in common with the traditional exposition-practice method of old. Typically, this approach presents a set of model sentences as examples, then uses translation exercises – from and into the target language – to help students internalise them.

This method fell out of favour in language pedagogy for a number of years. You can understand why: it is challenging. It is hard to keep students switched on during a marathon of what amounts to a linguistic mental gym. This kind of learn-by-constant-modelling flies the flag for the old chalk ‘n’ talk of old-fashioned classrooms, while more communicative methods promised to get kids speaking sooner. However, as Duolingo shows, there is a place for both.

Digging for gold

Now, one of my favourite things is digging out forgotten old language learning materials. Look beyond the sometimes quaintly dated content, and the constructions and grammatical models are just as relevant to today’s students. The original tranche of Teach Yourself books, for instance, can be language learning gems that need just the lightest dusting off to be enlisted into the action again.

Teach Yourself Maltese (1965)

A 1980s reprint of Teach Yourself Maltese (1965) from my eccentric collection of language books.

These long-lost books completely fit that old exposition-practice mould. But even better, they are cheap! You can pick up copies from second-hand booksellers online for mere pence. And many old, out-of-print volumes are available as scanned PDFs if you look hard enough online (like this reworked, archived copy of Teach Yourself Irish).

And because of the similarity of approach between this and Duolingo’s method, I started thinking: could I turn this material into something similar?

A resource is born

A couple of weekends of code-tapping later, and it started to emerge: the Polyglossic Text Machine! Or Sentence Driller. I can’t decide which yet (and as it is chiefly for my own use, it doesn’t really matter!)

I compile lists of model sentences from my ancient books, and the program turns them into interactive translation exercises. I love it; I am burning through material, just like I pecked through all those sentences the green owl prepared for us. And those structures are sticking.

Creating resources to drill foreign languages based on ancient translation exercises!

Creating resources to drill foreign languages based on ancient translation exercises!

The project is put together in a programming language called Haxe, which compiles to HTML5 for deployment on the web. Haxe is actually quite easy to get into, and at some point, I would love to do a tutorial series on using it to make language games. Please get in touch or comment if this is something you would find useful!

No programming required!

That said, I realise my luck in already having the skills to do this from the ground up. It is completely a geek’s game; not everybody has the time or interest to develop electronic resources from scratch.

But it needn’t be so fancy – there are lots of free tools around that replicate this kind of drilling game without programming skills. If you have sourced some material you think will make brilliant drill fodder, try feeding them into build-your-own-activity resources like the following:

Custom resources are not simply about getting exactly the kind of resource you want. The huge added benefits include ownership and familiarity. By researching and creating them, you make your first pass of the material. When you come to the actual learning and practising, you are already one step ahead!

Finally, my focus above has been completely digital. But creating and learning buddy up across any media. For example, do you learn well through storytelling? Then take a look at this study, which showed how creative storytelling noticeably improved active foreign language production. And for further reading on the topic of creation and learning, this lovely article offers several ideas.

Don’t wait for the perfect resources to come along. Take inspiration from the things you like best, and create your own!