I remember that when I was first learning Spanish in high school, I found a piece of (Windows) software that pelted you with a series of pairs of an infinitive and a tense, and you had to conjugate the infinitive accordingly. (Spanish conjugation typically changes the end of the word; irregular verbs tend to involve stem changes). It was fantastic practice and really ingrained the rules; I became a whiz at it.
When I started learning Russian, the declensions (like the ones mentioned in the article) really threw me for a loop. I looked all over for a similar app to explain the patterns and drill rote practice, but never found one.
While slightly off-topic, does anyone know of such an app (web-based or macOS/iOS)?
There's some Anki (flashcard) decks that use the "KOFI" method:
> KOFI (Konjugation First) is the name I've given to a provocative language-learning approach I've created: to learn all the forms of a language's conjugation before even starting to formally study the language
I used the French one, years after I learned French, because my conjugation was abysmal. You can get by using basic tenses or wrong tenses, and people will understand you, but it's not what you want. The KOFI method is supposed to teach you all the conjugation patterns in a matter of months before learning the language, I'd like to give it a try in-earnest some day for a new language. My interest in French has waned so I didn't stick with it.
> … learning Russian… explain the patterns… such an app
Non-native Russian speaker here. In the past, I cobbled together some scripts that use the spaCy Python module with the larger of the two Russian modules to provide context-aware lemmatization and grammatical tag extraction.
On the whole, though, my biggest gains in Russian were in letting go of the need to analytically deconstruct the inflections and instead build up a mental library of patterns (and exceptions) in my head through use.
EDIT: I mean context within a sentence, not a broader meaning.
When I was learning Spanish (on my own) 25 years ago I had a Spanish/English dictionary. It only translated verbs to Spanish infinitive, but each had a numerical index mapping it to a class of verbs with the same conjugation pattern.
There was a section at the front of the dictionary with full conjugation patterns over all tenses for one sample verb in each class.
Eg, each type of stem-changing verb fell into one index, full irregulars were singletons in their own class, some irregulars that behave similarly (iirc tener and detener) shared one class.
So all verbs in Spanish fell neatly into a few dozen unique patterns, and the indexing was already done.
I was going to build a quiz software just like you mentioned to conjugate any verb in any tense, but “never got around to it”.
I wonder how the reverse-string trie pattern in the article would be for reconstructing the class mapping.
I use ConjuGato on iOS for practicing Spanish conjugations. There’s a game mode where you’re given an infinitive/tense/person and think of the conjugation and you can filter it down to solely irregular verbs to learn the exceptions
I used Clozemaster effectively to learn Russian. It's not exactly what out describe, but you can fly through many "clozes" to ingrain the patterns into your brain.
I had an idea for a flash card generator for Russian that would do preposition + adjective + noun to get faster at declining in my head; I had done Latin before that and no one expects you to do Latin declension quickly (unless you're a monk maybe?). Never went anywhere with it, naturally.
Given how profitable it is, I doubt it’ll be changed.
That said, I very much like Codeweavers’ approach [0], which IMO is the modern equivalent to purchasing software on a physical medium: you buy it, you can re-download it as many times as you’d like, install it on as many machines as you’d like (single-user usage only), and you get 1 year of updates and support. After that, you can still keep using it indefinitely, but you don’t get updates or paid support. You get a discount if you renew before expiry. They also have a lifetime option which, so far, they’ve not indicated they’re going to change.
I have no affiliation with them, I just think it’s a good product, and a good licensing / sales model.
It's not really about the culture anymore. Software that requires maintenance — and most does — has a continuous development cost. As such, subscription is the most natural way to cover it.
On the other hand, we have software which has low maintenance cost, but sold for peanuts ($0-$10) in small quantities, so authors try to introduce alternative revenue streams.
As in, it's fair to pay continuously (subscription) for continuous work (maintenance), so I don't expect that to go away. Ads, though, yuck...
Software sold today does not require maintenance. Software to work in the future requires maintenance. I am not buying future software. I am buying today software.
This is a good argument in favor of subscriptions not being mandatory, but not in favor of the abolishment of subscriptions overall, which is what they were talking about.
That is the old way. You bought some application and it came with upgrades until next major version release or similar. Then when that release came out you could decide to pay again or just keep using the old (now unsupported) version you already paid for.
That solved all the issues with paying for maintenance, but sadly someone must have figured out a mandatory subscription was a better way to make more money.
It's not only a way to make more money, but it also matches better to modern development approaches.
Major versions come from a time where one had to produce physical media. Thus one could do a major release only every few years. Back then features had to be grouped together in a big bang release.
Nowadays one can ship features as they are being developed, with many small features changes all the time.
That was probably true a long time ago, but I bought software using that model that did not have any physical releases and at least one had frequent minor releases adding new features.
It seems to me like the "subscription model" is exactly the same, except for the use of DRM and cloud dependencies to force users to pay for new versions. The only thing that changed was that the option to remain on an old version was taken away from users.
Even ignoring security, bug fixes, new features, etc it is also not fair that you can get value from the app every month, but the developer doesn't get to capture a reward for any of this value. Having people pay monthly for value they get monthly seems reasonable.
Also leasing cars isn't usually (ever?) from the manufacturer of the car.
Houses, not sure how it's done in more populous areas, but around here you don't ever rent from the builder. You rent from someone who bought the house from a builder (or bought from someone who did, etc etc).
I disagree. You can read a book or listen to a record, watch a dvd, unlimited times, having fairly paid upfront a price for the item. A computer is general purpose and lets you check your email every day, hell even lets you create new value in the form of new software, without the manufacturer receiving a royalty.
The idea of capturing reward post-receipt is feudalistic.
The existence of products in competitive markets is not a counter example to what my point was. I recommend looking at the terms bottom up pricing and top down pricing. The former is about creating a price based off of how much it costs to do business and then adding a profit margin. The latter is creating price in line with how much value it offers customers. The existence of products using bottom up pricing doesn't mean top down pricing does not exist.
That's not how markets work (and I disagree that it would be reasonable).
Price is usually established based on how much something cost to make (materials, effort, profit), combined with market conditions (abundance/shortage of products, surplus cash/tough economy...).
If you want to continuously extract profit from consistent use of a hammer or vacuum cleaner, somebody else will trivially make a competing product at a lower price with no subscription.
>somebody else will trivially make a competing product at a lower price with no subscription.
And software like photoshop is not trivial to copy so it can survive being priced based off of value provided. There exists competitors that don't have a subscription, but they are not good enough to kill it.
When I started learning Russian, the declensions (like the ones mentioned in the article) really threw me for a loop. I looked all over for a similar app to explain the patterns and drill rote practice, but never found one.
While slightly off-topic, does anyone know of such an app (web-based or macOS/iOS)?