Tag: grammar

Lots of Flashcards floating down from buildings to the street below

Mastering Verbs with Anki: A Step-by-Step Guide

Verb conjugation is a sticking point for many language learners at some point. Of course, some languages let us off the hook with minimal paradigms, like Chinese, or Norwegian. As for the rest of them, there’s no getting around endings, stem changes, auxiliaries and the like.

Memorising entire conjugation tables by rote might work as an overview. But retaining reams of conjugation tables in memory, then using them naturally in context, is a different story.

That’s where Anki can help. By customising your cards to include not only disembodied parts, but also real-world, conjugated, in-use examples, verb drills will be less wading through treacle and more in-the-moment fast recall.

Here’s how.

Custom fields for verbs

It’s all about customising your note types to contain contextualising info, and not just a simple dictionary form and translation. A good ‘verb note’ should probably contain the main dictionary elements – infinitive, simple past and past participle, for example – but also a space for a sample sentence (or several, if you like).

To add these custom fields to a note type in Anki, start by opening the Manage Note Types menu. You can find this by clicking Tools > Manage Note Types in the top menu. Choose an existing note type you want to customise (or create a new one by clicking Add) and select Fields. In the fields editor, you can add new fields by clicking Add and giving the field a name, such as “Dictionary Form,” “Conjugated Sentence,” or “Notes.”

Making a custom note type for verbs in Anki

After you’ve done that, you can start adding items to your decks in this new format.

Adding an Anki card using a custom note type for verbs

We’re not quite done yet, though. Your new, custom note is up and running in terms of storing data – just not displaying it in cards, yet.

To include these fields on your flashcards, hit the Browse link in main Anki window, select the note type in the left-hand menu, then edit the card templates by selecting Cards in the right-hand pane. Insert your named fields into the template using curly braces, e.g., {{Dictionary Form}} or {{Sample Sentence}}. You can use basic HTML to style your data, too.

Customising a card view to use a new note type specifically for German verbs

Experiment with different strategies for where you place the info. The front side might contain just the English prompt, with the target language all on the flip side. Alternatively, you might want to keep your cards solely in the target language, with the infinitive on one side, and the parts / context material on the back.

Form and Use

The beauty of the customised note types approach is that a deck can contain multiple types. So, for verbs, enter your vocab using the note type created in the steps above. For other items like nouns, adjectives and so on, add using a basic card. Either that, or customise for those parts of speech, too – there’s no limit!

Mastering irregular verbs is all about context. Anki gives you the tools to leverage context in any way you please, through its extensive customisation tools. By taking advantage of Anki’s spaced repetition when learning verbs in full sentences, you’ll not only memorise their forms, but also their use. It’s especially effective when you make Anki cards one of your daily tactics.

Ready to take control of your verbs? Start building your deck today, and let Anki do the heavy lifting!

A Greek swirly texture!

Understanding ‘να’ in Greek: Where Did The Weather Go?

If you’re an English speaker learning Greek, you may have come across phrases like:

ελπίζω ο καιρός να είναι καλός
I hope the weather will be good

…and found yourself scratching your head. Why, you might wonder, does “the weather” (ο καιρός) seem to be relegated to a spot before the connector να? In English, we’d say, “I hope that the weather is good,” keeping “the weather” after ‘that’. In Greek, though, να doesn’t play along with this structure.

It all comes down to understanding να for what it really is – a subjunctive marker, and not a conjunction.

Say Na Na Na – for Greek

The particle να is very picky about what it allows around it: να must precede the verb, forming a neat package with it, leaving no room for anything else in between. The only exception is the word μην, not. This structure – with ‘weather’ heading it – places the whole clause, ο καιρός να είναι καλός, as the object of ελπίζω (“I hope”).

In Greek, the construction feels natural, while to English speakers, it may look like ελπίζω is just left hanging without an obvious subject. But once we appreciate να as a subjunctive marker rather than a conjunction, the structure makes more sense.

Let’s look at a few other examples where this subjunctive magic word order comes into play:

Ελπίζω η Ελένη να έρθει σύντομα.
I hope Helen comes soon.

Ελπίζω ο γιατρός να είναι ευχαριστημένος.
I hope the doctor is happy.

Recognising να as a subjunctive marker – and that ‘hope’ takes a whole clause as its complement – transforms how we see these Greek structures. Instead of expecting conjunctions and noun placements as in English, we come to appreciate how να insists on a tidy verb clause, helping Greek verbs express hope, wishes, and desires in their own neat way.

The cover of Scottish Gaelic - A Comprehensive Grammar (Routledge)

Scottish Gaelic : A Comprehensive Grammar Released This Week!

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It’s a moment Gaelic learners and general language aficionados have been waiting a long time for. Routledge has finally added the language to its Comprehensive Grammar series!

Released this week, the new reference work by Edinburgh University’s Professor William Lamb fills a real gap on the Gaelic bookshelf. Learners looking for a modern guide have had a much narrower choice of much briefer handbooks, such as Michel Byrne’s excellent, but rather slim Gràmar na Gàidhlig. Either that, or explore the  ambitious descriptive grammars of old, like Shaw’s 18th-Century Analysis of the Gaelic Language, which is fascinating, but not particularly contemporary (although you know I love an ancient language manual).

The new Routledge tome weighs in at a hefty 580 pages, and looks to be an exhaustive tour of the contemporary language. It’s also very reasonably priced at around the £30 mark (compare, for example, the price of the Swedish counterpart!). If you’re a student, then you can get an additional 25% off that by buying directly from Routledge via a student discount site like Student Beans.

Suas leis a’ Ghàidhlig!

Getting a Handle on Modern Greek : The Imperfect Tense

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We all have a sticking point somewhere in our target languages. For me and Modern Greek, it was, for too long, the imperfect tense.

I noticed it in conversation classes with my teacher. I’d be narrating a story or incident, flowing easily enough when talking about single events in the past. I saw, I heard, I went… All simple past, or aorist, in Greek: είδα, άκουσα, πήγα (ída, ákusa, píga).

It all unravelled when I needed to express what was ongoing. I was talking, I was sleeping, I was thinking… The kind of thing we use the past continuous for in English. We use this device very frequently in storytelling, especially when one action undercuts or interrupts another. Think: I was watching the TV when…

All this means that if you only have a handle on the simple past, you can only really tell half the story.

When I spot a gap like this, I like to simplify it before tackling it. And with verbs, a nice simplification trick for learning is to only learn the parts you use regularly at first. For me, the sticking points came when talking to my teacher about what I was doing.

So I’d focus first on learning just the imperfect patterns for the first person, singular, the ‘I’ form.

The Imperfect Tense in Modern Greek – Egotistical Edition

Here – greatly simplified – is the ‘cheat sheet’ I used to get a handle on the imperfect tense in Modern Greek.

Type A (verbs stressed before the final syllable like γράφω – write)

The stress moves back a syllable – if there’s no syllable to move back to, you add a stressed ε- at the beginning. The first person singular ending is -α.

Example: γράφω (gráfo, I write) – έγραφα (égrafa, I was writing)

In many ways, this is the easiest one – it has the same pattern as the aorist, which many master early on, but without any root change. Compare έγραψα (égrapsa – I wrote).

Type B ( verbs with final stressed -ώ or -άω like μιλάω – speak)

These verbs have a whole set of endings to themselves – variations on -ούσα (-úsa). There’s no stress change – we just substitute the -ώ/-άω for -ούσα in the first person singular:

Example: μιλάω (miláo, I speak) – μιλούσα (milúsa, I was speaking)

Passive and Deponent Verbs (ending in -μαι like κοιμάμαι – sleep)

Now these are the strange ones. Although not so strange, if you’ve already learnt the word for I was, which is ήμουν (ímun) in Modern Greek. The verb ‘to be’ – irregular in so many languages – actually follows the endings of the passive verbs, so you already knew the pattern without realising. In the first person singular, the imperfect tense takes the ending -όμουν (-ómun):

Example: κοιμάμαι (kimáme, I sleep) – κοιμόμουν (kimómun – I was sleeping)

Roundup

So there you have it. Rather than learning a whole paradigm of six persons for three types of verb – 18 forms – you can get your first grip on the imperfect tense in Modern Greek by learning three examples. To round them up:

Group Present (1ps) Imperfect (1ps)
I γράφω έγραφα
II μιλάω μιλούσα
Passive κοιμάμαι κοιμόμουν

Needless to say, when you’ve memorised these, changing the person – to you, she, we and so on – is just a case of adjusting the ending slightly. The -α (-a) changes to -ες (-es) for ‘you’, for example, while the -όμουν (-ómun) changes to -όσουν (-ósun). But that’s for the next stage of your functional, chunked-up tense learning. In the meantime, you can enjoy being able to express what you were doing in the past when chatting with your teacher!

The one-form-at-a-time focus can be a motivation-saving shortcut for heavily inflected languages. It’s helped me with other tricky verb forms in Greek, as well as other languages. It’s part of the wider truth that nothing is too big to learn if you break it down into chunks – advice worth remembering when you keep coming up against stubborn gaps in your language learning knowledge.

Have you had similar experiences when learning conjugations? Which were your trickiest tenses? And how did you master them? Let us know in the comments below!

A digital imagining of Scotland

Scottish Gaelic : Chasing the Genitive Case

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It’s typically the last of the Gaelic cases you cover in classes. And in many ways, it’s the most fiendish. Yes, it’s the genitive case, the case of possession.

I felt possessed at several times this week, I must admit – possessed by a language conundrum I couldn’t work out. It started with a puzzle. I had two example phrases I’d written from somewhere (where, I do not remember – a bit of a notes-taking fail, I’m afraid!). They are:

ann an diofar dòigh bho… (in a different way from…)
ann an diofar dhòighean bho… (in different ways from…)

I knew diofar (different) took the genitive. But I didn’t know what was causing that d > dh lenition in the plural. Do all plural genitive nouns lenite, or was I overgeneralising? I didn’t fit the pattern where there’s a plural definite article – that would be nan dòighean (of the ways/methods) instead, without lenition.

I’d obviously got quite an incomplete grasp of the genitive plural in my Scottish Gaelic memory banks.

On the genitive plural trail

Anyway, simple enough to look up, right? Nope. The puzzle led me on a bit of a wild goose chase. It turns out that there aren’t many really comprehensive explanations of the genitive out there. There’s plenty on the genitive singular, but just a little on the plural here and there – and only then just with the definite article.

Until I checked some older, out-of-print books (my super-economical secret weapon!). Two old Gaelic course books have really clear, cover-all-bases sections on the genitive case:

The first of these in particular was really no-nonsense and clear. In fact, there’s a whole section dedicated to the genitive plural. There, in section 68c, it states clearly:

When the article does not precede a genitive plural noun, the noun is automatically lenited. In other words indefinite genitive plurals are lenited, e.g.:
mòran ghillean (G, pl) a large number of boys, many boys
beagan bhòrd (G, pl) a small number of tables

Of course, mòran and beagan trigger that same indefinite genitive that diofar does. By now, I’d worked it out myself, of course – but it’s always good to have confirmation from a proper grammar.

It just shows that more up-to-date materials aren’t always the best. It’s frustrating that there wasn’t anything more comprehensive and current out there for Scottish Gaelic, although perhaps not surprising. But thankfully, older, fuller works are still available with a little second-hand digging.

Can’t find the answer? An old (maybe not even that old) book might be what you’re looking for.

(That said, there’s a very exciting new addition to the Routledge Grammars that’s coming out very soon – can’t wait!)

The Verb Blitz Adage : Keep It Simple

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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!

Using Bing's AI chat to play a word association game in French.

AI Chat Prompts for Language Learning Practice

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As AI becomes more and more a fixture of daily life, it’s not surprising to see it sneaking gradually into the language learning setting. The list of AI-infused apps is growing daily: premium chatbots, word games and other practice tools that are taking app stores by storm.

But before you shell out the cash, be reassured that you don’t need to spend a penny to bring the magic of AI to your own routine. You can achieve exactly the same, routine-transforming effects with a few handy prompts and free-to-access AI platforms.

AI for Free

There is an impressive and ever-growing array of AI chatbots to experiment with, some free, some premium. The difference, largely, is in the amount of environment setup that has already been done in premium apps. This is often just a case of configuring the AI to play a certain role, or act in a certain way. But here’s the secret:

You can do this easily yourself, with no development skills required.

It’s simply a case of good prompting. Tell it, in simple, natural English, the rules of the activities you want to run. Define the way you want it to respond to you. Give it a role to play. And state your limits and boundaries. Get a handle on prompting effectively, and popular, free platforms will more than suffice.

The biggie, of course, is ChatGPT, which has a solid free tier for general use. Google have also joined the game with the commendable Bard, which is definitely worth a look. That said, since Microsoft released their new AI-powered Bing chat mode, I’ve been using that more and more. It has an excellent Creative Mode preset, which gives it more unpredictable, humanlike responses. Just bear in mind that Bing currently limits the conversation to a 30-interaction maximum.

The following examples use French and Swedish to show how I’ve been using it to support my own language practice. Just swap in your own target language as required!

Word Games

The simplest kind of game to set up is good old basic word play. The following prompt sets up a turn-based alphabet game, which challenges your vocab recall:

Let’s play a word game in French. We have to go through the alphabet in turns, stating a verb that begins with each letter, plus a short sentence using that verb in context. Let’s play!

One of the best things about using AI for these kinds of language games is the capacity for on-the-fly correction and feedback; it can sometimes appear almost human. Below, I started cheating by inventing words, but Bing was far too clever to be caught out!

Playing a language learning word game - and trying to cheat - with Microsoft Bing's AI-powered chat mode.

Playing a language learning word game – and trying to cheat – with Microsoft Bing’s AI-powered chat mode.

Another fun vocab item practice mode is word association. The following prompt sets up a game where the meaning of each turn’s word must be related to the last. If the bot considers the link too tenuous, you lose the game:

Let’s play a word association game in French. You kick us off with a random noun. We then take it in turns to give a word which is somehow related in meaning to the last. If the link is too tenuous, the player loses. Shall we play?

It’s a great way to recycle vocabulary. You might need to play with the prompt to make your AI teacher a little less strict, though. Mine ended up with a bit of a mean streak. Very harsh!

Bing AI being VERY harsh on me in a word association game.

Bing AI being VERY harsh on me in a word association game.

Story Games (with Tutor Mode!)

When you’re ready to take it beyond words, AI is ready for you. One of the most amusing ways to practise with full sentences is storytelling. Try this prompt for a narrative whirl:

Let’s play a turn-based storytelling game to help me practise my French. We build a story by taking it in turns to add a sentence each time. Please keep the language level to about A2, and tell me about any mistakes I make as we go along. The story should be set in the present day. You start us off!

Note the specification of a language level, as well as the instruction to correct your mistakes as you go. It makes the AI response so rich and helpful that it really is a gift to learn from. To tailor it further, try adding instructions about which tenses to use (narrative present or past?), and even vocabulary topics to crowbar in.

Role-play

Ai chat can prepare you for real-world chat, too. Setting up a foreign language role-play is as simple as describing the situation in as much detail as you like:

Let’s do some role-play to help me practise my French! You play a friendly waiter in a Paris café, and I am a customer. I enter the café and you come over to take my order. You realise I’m learning French and so give me very simple descriptions of all the dishes. But you keep mishearing me, so I have to repeatedly rephrase what I ask for.

This can be as straight-laced or as silly as you like. Sometimes, it’s a case of the crazier, the better. There’s nothing like a bit of silliness to increase engagement and recall.

You can even target the chat more by priming the AI with the actual vocabulary items you want to lever in. It’s a great way to recycle words over and over again:

I want to practise talking in Swedish about family. Imagine you’re a friend of mine and we’re having a chat about our families. Keep the language level to about A2 on the CEFR language scale, and using the following words as much as possible: mamma, pappa, bror, syster, vänner, snäll, vänlig, lita på, besöka

Whether you’re new to AI, or just beginning to experiment with it yourself, I hope these sample prompts give you some useful, fun practice ideas. Do you have any good ones to add to the list? Let us know in the comments!

The Turkish flag. Image from freeimages.com

A Foray into Turkish Verbs

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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.

Close-up of the cover of Routledge's Hindi : An Essential Grammar (2022)

Hindi : An Essential Grammar [Review]

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Hindi has sat comfortably amongst Routledge’s Essential Grammars range for some time, offering students the concise, systematic grammatical treatment the whole series is known for. The title appeared in its first edition back in 2007, so a fresh, updated version was a very welcome addition to bookshelves at the end of 2022.

Anyone familiar with my own bookish exploits will know that the Routledge Essential and Comprehensive Grammar series are close to my language lover’s heart. They’re all excellently researched reference and study works, supported throughout with authentic, real-world language. Recent editions have benefitted from an even clearer layout and eye-friendly typesetting, and the Hindi title is no exception. They’re very easy on the reader, particularly in terms of line spacing and table layout.

The book takes the familiar parts-of-speech approach, chunking grammatical elements into particularly brief, easily manageable chapters. This makes for real indexical ease, obvious from the detailed, seven-page contents section. No wading through an amorphous Nouns chapter here! But it’s great for targeted study, too; you could easily tackle a whole section in an hour-long study session, either independently or with a teacher.

As well as the usual amendments and corrections, this second edition offers extended explanations on several aspects of Hindi. These include extra material on flexible word order, ergativity, and politeness distinctions. As with other updates, such as the second edition of the Greek Essential, it’s great to see Routledge’s commitment to keeping the whole series relevant.

Script Support

The book is a winner on another important front, too: alternative script usage. To be fair, if you’re serious about learning Hindi in the long-term, then you’ll probably have started with Devanagari well before picking up this grammar. You might even have studied Devanagari before your Hindi journey like some (ahem). Devanagari is no prerequisite to learning to speak Hindi, of course, and if you’re in it for the casual dabbling, you might not have the time or inclination.

With this grammar, it’s no sweat at all. You can dive into any section of the book and read examples in Devanagari or Latin transliteration. The transliteration is extremely straightforward, too, using capitals to represent retroflex consonants, and the tilde for nasalised vowels. And the transliteration takes nothing away from the book’s commitment to both lanes; this edition still concludes with a substantial section on contemporary script usage, including current trends and recent changes.

Transliteration throughout might sound like a no-brainer, but it’s really not a given with Hindi primers. I’ve been working with Teach Yourself Hindi Tutor recently, and although it’s a truly fantastic and valuable resource, it requires proficiency in Devanagari from step one. Similarly, many beginner’s textbooks provide Latin support only so far, before switching to script after the initial chapters. For some, native script is a choice that definitely comes later on.

All in all, my verdict won’t be a surprise, considering my understandable fanboying of the series: I think this one’s just swell! For Hindi scholars, Indo-Europeanists and dabblers alike, Hindi : An Essential Grammar is a solid title in the series, substantially improved in its new edition.

Filipino : An Essential Grammar, published by Routledge in October 2022.

Filipino : An Essential Grammar [Review]

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Only the other day was I heralding the appearance of two brand new Routledge Essential Grammars – and just in time for Christmas, too. So what should land on my doormat this week but the very latest addition, Filipino : An Essential Grammar? There’s no such thing as coincidences, I hear you cry!

Any new language is a welcome addition to Routledge’s solid family of language learning texts, and with this one, it’s a double whammy; it pips the publisher’s own Colloquial series, which still lacks a Filipino / Tagalog title. For a language with upwards of 80+ million speakers worldwide, the book plugs a textbook gap with the solid, practical approach we’ve come to love from the Essential collection.

Filipino : A Concise But Comprehensive Essential

At just shy of 200 pages, the title, penned by Sheila Zamar, is one of the lighter volumes in the series (check out the brilliant Icelandic edition for a true doorstop of a book, for comparison). That said, it’s by no means light on content, divided into well-defined parts-of-speech chapters. Each of these is concise and snappy, but still chock-full of examples of language in use.

Filipino : An Essential Grammar, published by Routledge in October 2022.

As a self-confessed verb obsessive, it’s extremely satisfying to see four very chunky sections (nearly half the book) taken up with a systematic presentation of the verbal system. It’s what you’d expect, given the quite different (and fascinating) classes of Austronesian conjugation, but the exposition and explanation is handled with neat, logical progression. Handily, glosses are provided alongside many of the examples, so you can see exactly what is going on in a given sentence.

(Type)set for Success

If you’re a fan of the series you’ll have already noticed, but I should add a word or two about the excellent formatting of the whole reissued grammar series. From the clean, sans-serif fonts to the clutter-free setting of the tables, the new editions are all exceptionally clear and easy to read. The block-colour covers in blues, aquamarines, crimsons and bricks look both artsy and academically serious at the same time, although that leaves me with one mystery: what do the cover colours signify, if anything? My first thought was language groups or families, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Perhaps authors have the option to choose their own favourite as a wee thank you for their work. Answers on a postcard in the comments.

Filipino : An Essential Grammar is certainly worthy of its essential title in a not-so-crowded textbook field for the language. Heartily recommended for serious learners and casually interested polyglots alike!