Help needed with Spanish!?

Question

I'm in Spanish 102 and it's getting down to the wire in terms of the semester and finals coming up. I suck at this crap and would only rate myself as a level 101 still. The verbs/ conjugation are killing me! We're already doing Present Perfect. Anyone have any suggestions as to websites, books, dictionarys, etc that can help??

Answer 1

I think you just got a good answer from Richard, but I would HIGHLY recommend the book "501 Spanish Verbs" if you do not already have this. It shows all 84+ conjugations of each verb, and really helps in understanding the differences between the regular and irregular verbs, such as the stem-changing verbs. It also has some helpful pointers about the use of each verb.

Answer 2

The first link is a verb drill site which is quite good. I've used it a lot. The second one is a free site for students and teachers, which I haven't tried out yet.

If you google for 'spanish verb drills', that turns up loads of sites.

You can also search for books on Amazon which have 'spanish verb drills' in the title (see link). I have a copy of 'Spanish verb Drills' by Vivienne Bey, that I've provided a link to. That was very good.

To test yourself on verb conjugations, there's a drill and test program called Supermemo, short for Super Memorisation, that helps you learn the most knowledge in the minimum time. It keeps track of how easy you found it to answer a question, from 'I had no idea of the answer', through 'I knew it once, but forgot it', up to 'I knew it instantly'. You just click on 1-5, how easy was it.

The program then re-schedules the same question, so that things you know well only re-appear after a long time and things you hardly knew at all re-appear more often. Hence, you don't waste time on things you know well. If you use it regularly, it keeps all the things you know fresh in your mind, ideal for exams.

The latest version costs money, but there's an older free version Supermemo 98 (see link) which is still very good. There are some spanish sets of questions with the program or on the website. Also you can create a text file of your own questions and answers in the following simple format and read that into the program :-

Q: I speak spanish.
A: Hablo espanol.
Q: I have a dog.
A: Tengo un perro.
etc.

There must be a space after the Q: or A: and you might need a blank line between each Q and A pair.

You can use it for both grammer testing and vocab learning.

From the main supermemo page, its on the 'Which supermemo is right for you page' (see last link), Supermemo 98.