Flawless Recall: Universal Memorization Method For Conjugating Regular Spanish Verbs, For Students And Teachers: Flawless Recall

By Alexander Van Berg

Whether you're looking at the AP Spanish test, the SAT Spanish test, or another Spanish assessment, if you are a teacher or a student, and you need flawless recall of regular Spanish verb conjugations across 18 tenses, you need this book.

 

To the new student of Spanish, a big chart that shows you regular Spanish verb conjugations is simply too much disparate information. That's the problem, plain and simple. You're looking at a large sea of random information, with too few patterns and too little cohesion to make memorization easy.

 

The mind needs that disparate information crafted into something memorable.

 

We need to bring intelligent, overwhelming, skillful order to that chaos. We cannot accept "rote memorization" as the way to learn regular Spanish verb conjugations over 18 tenses. For many students, it will simply not be learned! That's not state‑of‑the‑art. That's a poor plan. That's never going to work effectively or efficiently.

 

You are now looking at the best memorization method ever composed for regular Spanish verb conjugations, and it will be distilled directly into your mind. Slowly but surely, you will have flawless recall of regular Spanish verb conjugations. When you follow the instructions in the book, the memorization becomes involuntary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alexander Van Berg
• Release date: Aug 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201000332

Book preview

Preface

As I progressed through the basics of learning Spanish, regular Spanish verb conjugations (in the slightly more exotic tenses) were starting to become more and more of a learning bottleneck. That is actually what led me to write this book. That’s a disclaimer, a full warning, and perhaps a unique benefit all rolled into one. On the one hand, I wrote this book without any sort of prodigious concern for what types of reviews it might receive, nor the level of financial profit it might yield!  On the other hand, since I’m still learning Spanish, all of the different learning roadblocks may be a little more fresh in my mind, as compared to a tenured Spanish professor.  And with any luck, that immediate familiarity will make this a better book for you.

Of course, it would be great if the book received good reviews and raked in a healthy profit – that’s why I published it.  But either way, the book’s content already benefits me as a student of Spanish.

If you imagine a three-circle Venn diagram featuring ambitious, doable, and valuable, I’d say this book hits the dead-center bullseye of that chart.  Concerning the notion of valuable, I’d say we need a better system for learning these conjugations besides rote memorization.  Rote memorization takes a very long time to work.  Its effectiveness and efficiency are very low.  So it’s definitely time for academia to evolve here, and thus, this book is now available for Spanish students anywhere.

Now, if I were to take that Venn diagram, and squeeze a few additional circles into it, I’d probably add a circle for happens-to-aid-my-own-learning-while-I-create-it, and a circle for mostly-enjoyable-to-create.

So that’s not a bad Venn diagram to go with.

Introduction

The common teaching style in schools tends to revolve around rote memorization, and the analogy here would be traveling in Japan from Tokyo to Kyoto.  Rote memorization is like crawling there with a heavy ball and chain shackled to your ankle, while a good memorization system is like taking the bullet train.  Yes, the bullet train still takes time to get there, but it gets there a lot faster than crawling, and more importantly, it’s also reliable!

This book requires no previous experience with mnemonics.  It requires no understanding of mnemonics theory, and it does not attempt to educate the reader in mnemonics theory.  This book provides a universal memorization method that anyone can use.

It’s assumed that the reader is at least in junior high or high school, and note that there’s no upper age limit. This book was written so that anyone in that broad age range can simply pick it up and begin reading it.

It will be helpful, but not strictly necessary, if the reader has a bare basic awareness of the Spanish language.  For example, we are going to talk about where accent marks go on certain words, but we are not going to explain what an accent mark is.  If this book happens to be a student’s first exposure to the Spanish language, they may need to occasionally look something up.

And regarding the length of the book, do not be intimidated!  You will see that there is plenty of white space, and it’s there to help break up the information so it’s easier to read and digest.  And regarding the information itself, the majority of it is there as commentary, to help you memorize.  Only a relatively small amount of information actually needs to be memorized.

English language guidelines in compendiums like The AP Style Guide provide simple rules for when a number should be spelled out (e.g. nine) versus typed as an actual number (e.g. 9).  By default, I follow widely accepted practices for matters such as this.  However, I also deviate from those practices routinely, and I do it when I believe it makes the text more readable, which, in this book, is what’s most important.

As advertised, I am not an expert in Spanish.  Therefore, you can expect some (essentially) inconsequential errors, and those errors will probably concern things like perfect, exacting terminology.  That said, there should be no consequential errors.  There should be no errors as it pertains to the memorization of regular Spanish verb conjugations.

This book allows you to memorize regular Spanish verb conjugations.  It does not handle conjugations for irregular Spanish verbs - which by their very nature are often different from one another and not easily sandwiched into a monolithic system.  I read that about 60% of Spanish verbs are regular, so you’re not doing too bad if you can memorize all conjugations for the majority of Spanish verbs simply by reading this book! It probably also goes without saying that your best strategy is to learn regular Spanish verb conjugations first.

Additionally, we are not covering progressive tenses (e.g. estoy escribiendo).  Some books treat those as primary tenses, and some books handle them separately.  There are two simple reasons we’re not covering them here.  First, those tenses are very simple; there’s very little to memorize.  Second, even though the conjugations are simple, they would still increase the complexity of the mnemonic system we’re creating, and I don’t want to do that.  I want to minimize the size and the complexity of our mnemonic system, and trimming those out is one good way to do that.

Let’s quickly touch on some very basic mnemonics theory, and I promise this will be just about the only theory you see in the entire book.

As it pertains to the conjugation of regular Spanish verbs, I will be helping you organize your thoughts in a reliable manner.  If you organize your thoughts in a particular way, according to modern mnemonics theory, a virtually limitless amount of information can be remembered.  Unfortunately, the average person is not aware of mnemonics theory, and even a small number of thoughts becomes disorganized and chaotic.  It becomes a jumble of information that cannot be recalled in a reliable manner.  A simple analogy here might be a house wrecked by a tornado.  Stuff is scattered everywhere and who knows where to find it!  We don’t want that.  We want an orderly bookshelf for your thoughts, and that’s what we’ll be building together.

The stories you will be learning comprise the harness or scaffolding for regular Spanish verb conjugations.  If you make the effort to memorize the stories, this scaffolding will slowly become less and less relevant in terms of recalling conjugations.  The conjugations themselves will start to melt in to your permanent memory, where they’ll basically just sit there waiting for instant recall, like anything else you know by heart.  But again, first we need that scaffolding in place to get everything set up and structured.

How many times will you have to read or review these stories in order to memorize them?  The rule of thumb is 3 times spaced out over 72 hours, and done with a certain degree of focus.  For some people it may be a little more, and for some a little less, but that’s a good rule of thumb.

Alright, the stories indicate what the conjugations are, and once you memorize the stories, the underlying conjugations will slowly start to melt in to your permanent memory, but this melt-in process takes time, and it’s also a process with many variables.  In the meantime, that scaffolding (i.e. those stories) contains all the information necessary to recall any regular Spanish verb conjugation.  It just requires more mental cycles when you look for the conjugation via the stories, as compared to when everything is melted in and you finally have true install recall.

OK, that’s the basic theory for how this book works.  You may encounter a little bit of additional theory later on, but it’ll be mostly optional.

And now that that theory’s out of the way, let’s get on with the book.

Your mind is the most powerful field of dreams.

- Author

CASE STUDY: Designing A Mnemonic System For Regular Spanish Verb Conjugations

For the mnemonics student, mnemonics hobbyist, mnemonics adventurist, or mnemonics enthusiast, this chapter might be valuable to you.

But for the average student of Spanish who just wants to memorize regular verb conjugations, this chapter may be almost completely useless, and probably even counterproductive.  So if you're not specifically interested in how someone goes about designing a mnemonic system, you should almost certainly skip this chapter, and go right to the next chapter, which is Memorizing How To Conjugate Regular Spanish Verbs In 3 Stages.

IF YOU ARE SIMPLY A STUDENT OF SPANISH, IT IS STRONGLY RECOMMENDED THAT YOU SKIP AHEAD TO THE NEXT CHAPTER.

But if you're interested in gaining a deeper understanding of how one designs a mnemonic system in general, then read on.  This chapter will be written in a stream of consciousness style.  It should reflect how I brainstormed the early system that would eventually get used in this book – most likely after a lot of modification.  I’ve never designed a mnemonic system for this general subject area.  So, in wide-open spaces like the one we’re staring at right now, you’ve got to start somewhere, and this case study will show you how I began.

And to reiterate, you should assume there will eventually be lots of changes to anything devised in this chapter.

Furthermore, this case study will undergo much less editorial rigor, when compared to the main content of this book.  The point of this chapter isn’t to have the most accurate, highest-quality information.  The point of this chapter is to get the ideas flowing, and to also illustrate how I’m getting those ideas flowing, along with relevant questions about the prospective design and the idea flow inside my head.

And if you’re not really following a particular idea that I express, don’t sweat it.  Some of these ideas might require several additional paragraphs if we were actually trying to ensure comprehension, and that’s not the point of this chapter.  So just try to go with the flow as much as possible.

Finally, if you’ve decided you want to read this chapter, consider this idea before diving in: You might want to actually read this chapter last.  Reading this chapter last might remove any subconscious ambiguity concerning which version of the design is the final version, while still allowing you to discern all the differences between the early design stage and the final product.

Alright, let's take a look at the space we’re working in, and then design the system.

One of the only constraints I want to put on this system is I want it to be as universally accessible as possible.  I don't want to make it dependent on any mnemonic technologies that require previous learning.  This should be a book that anyone can pick up and get full value out of right away.

Right now I have 3 verb conjugation charts in front of me - one for an -ar verb (hablar), one for an -er verb (comer), and one for a -ir verb (vivir).  By simple comparison I can verify that -ar and -er/-ir are mostly distinct, and also -er and -ir are almost identical, except for Indicative::Present::nosostros, Indicative::Present::vosotros, and Affirmative-Imperative::vosotros.  Thus, let's design our system to treat -ar and -er/-ir as two different cases, and also come up with a special way to handle the 3 differences between -er and -ir.

I can tell right away hablar, comer, and vivir are probably not the best 3 verbs to run with.  We don't know what the system will look like yet, but hablar and comer are two similar in terms of what occurs - they both involve doing something with the mouth, and I want something more distinct for possible visualizations.  Also, vivir is not a good verb to