Verbtime - Background and detailled description
Coniuno / Verbtime
Verbtime was started as "Coniuno" in 2005 and is called "Verbtime" since 2023, simply because the new name is more easy to remember.
The idea behind Verbtime
The goal of Verbtime is to understand verb conjugations in general and improve the usage of verbs by doing game-like exercises to strengthen your natural sensitivity for the foreign language. The goal is not to learn a handful of verbs by heart over and over again. Even if one knows their few conjugations very perfectly soon, still conjugating and using new, not yet learned verbs is a great challenge. And when using many different verbs, which you need, if you want to really speak a foreign language, learning them all by heart is actually not practicable. So what is needed is a way to learn the mechanisms behind the verbs, the patterns with that the verbs are built. If you apply the patterns often enough on different verbs, then your sensitivity for the language will improve. Compare that to English, where you just know that Present, singular III gets an "s" attached, like "he goes", "she swims", "he talks". You don't need to think about that, you just apply the pattern silently. The same will happen with foreign languages, where suddenly the conjugation forms of new verbs will naturally come to your mind.
Therefore the idea behind Verbtime is to practice the possible conjugations of freely selectable verbs in random order. And these verbs can be regular, irregular, reflexive and/or in passive voice. There are about 200 default verbs provided with the program in all languages, which you can use all at once or group in training packages and you have the possibility to add your own personal verbs, just by adding the verbs in mother tongue and training language (e.g. "swim" = "schwimmen"). Verbtime will take care of all the conjugations in the background for you.
Furthermore, a great number of settings allow you to setup the program according to your personal training needs. If for example you want to learn a new conjugation form (e.g. the "past perfect" in English or the "passato remoto" in Italian), then you can limit your training to exactly these tenses. Verbtime will practice these tenses with you until you can easily conjugate even brand new verbs without any problems. Or maybe you get confused by a language’s plural II and plural III forms. Verbtime will only train plural II and plural III with you. Or maybe you just want to practice verb conjugations from randomly selected verbs and randomly selected tenses to improve your general confidence in conjugating verbs. Verbtime helps you with this.
Further details
Verbtime builds the verbs by applying building patterns as much as possible for regular and irregular verbs. Irregular verbs which cannot be identified uniquely are maintained in comprehensive lists. These lists can be accessed by you to add special irregular verbs, not known to the program yet. Truly irregular verbs, not following any patterns, are coded in the program directly. As shortly mentioned above, that enables you to add your personal verbs by just adding them in your mother tongue and in the training language to already have the verbs available in your training!
Accordingly, as a first module, the program provides you with the conjugation tables for all languages. Here you can enter arbitrary verbs, even in half sentences, (e.g. "shave", "shave the beard", "wash oneself" etc.) and you will receive all regular and irregular conjugations.
The actual major function however is the training of any time form of any verb from one language to another language. For this reason the program uses one language as "mother-tongue", e.g. English and another language as "training language", e.g. French. As result, Verbtime will ask you for verb forms from English to French. Or from Spanish to Italian. Or from Latin to German and so on.
Then you get the verb tables of the supported training languages as help files. Contained are all conjugation rules / patterns that Verbtime uses to conjugate verbs. When doing language training with the PC installation of the program, you can check the current verb directly in the corresponding verb table by pressing the F4 key.
Other functions (to just list some) are a multiple choice training, an interactive conjugation help, search functions for irregular verbs, import and export routines to exchange your verb lists with friends, statistics functions to plan future trainings and to not forget, the extensive help files.
Online Training
Some of the Verbtime modules are available from the homepage on the Internet.
Here you find the Multiple Choice Training, the conjugation of arbitrary verbs in all languages, as well as the verb tables with the conjugation rules.
(The verb conjugation training module is under preparation).
As registered user you can as well configure your training to your personal needs and use all Verbtime default verbs as well as your personal verbs for the training.
Why not use the Multiple Choice Training to bridge waiting times with some verb conjugation game using your Smartphone?
Which languages can be trained with Verbtime?
Verbtime supports conjugating verbs in the Romance languages French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin. And in addition to that, in English, Dutch, and German.
The conjugations can be done in any direction.
The program itself, as well as the help files and verb tables, come in English and German writing.
But what Verbtime cannot do?
Verbtime is no translation tool and Verbtime is no complete library of all possibly existing irregular verbs of a language.
Verbtime is just a helping tool to develop your language sensitivity, so that you will become more secure in using verbs and their various conjugations.
If nonetheless you want to use a special irregular verb that Verbtime does not know yet, then normally you can easily add the verb to Verbtime for training.
I hope that you like Verbtime!
Helmut Bischoff