Loro

Spanish Conjugations Lite

Thanks for downloading Loro. With the full version of this application you will master over 1500 verb conjugations.


Setting preferences

To get you started let me walk you through a complete learning session. Tap on Settings in the tab bar.


Change the option Delay Before Answer to Manually. This lets you slide in the answer manually, which is better suited for beginners. After that, tap on the button labeled Deselect All Entries. This ensures that no learning material is selected.


Selecting learning material

Every word and every conjugation has a check mark displayed next to it. A white check mark indicates that an entry is not selected. A black check mark indicates that it has been selected for learning. In the categories view you will notice also a grey check mark. Grey indicates that some words belonging to a category have been selected, but not all. You can select or, deselect a certain entry by just tapping on its check mark. By setting the check mark you tell the application that you want to learn this entry. Selecting single words is cumbersome. There is a much better way to select the learning material: categories.

You can select whole groups of words by selecting a category. We will start our learning session with the present tense for bailar (to dance). To do this tap Browse on the tab bar


and tap on the button labeled Categories. Now you will see a list of categories. At the top of the list you will find the different verb forms and different tenses. In the second half of the list the verb infintives are shown. All categories should be unchecked because we deselected all entries when we adjusted the settings. Now tap on the white check marks of categories Presente and bailar. We now have selected our learning material and can start the learning process.


Learn the selected material

Tap on Learn in the tab bar.


At this time you will see only one single button labeled Learn. A second button, labeled Repeat, will be shown when there is learning material which needs to be repeated. For now just tap on Learn. The first question will be shown to you. In the first line you will see the tense. In our example it is Presente. The pronoun will be on the second line and the verb's infinitive on the third line.

What is the third person plural (ellos) of bailar? Correct. The answer is bailan. To check whether the answer you have on mind is correct, you need to switch to the answer view. You do this by swiping with your finger from right to left. The application will show the answer together with a control bar. Now you need to tell the application whether you knew the answer or not. You do this by either tapping yes or no on the control bar.

When you tap yes the program will advance the entry to the next higher group. In case you had to tap on no, the program will revert the entry back to the first group. This ensures that the entries you do not know are repeated more often than the ones you know. This will save you a lot of time and makes your learning both effective and efficient.


Groups

We came across groups already. By means of the group concept the application decides which entries need to be learned at what time. There are nine groups: Unlearned, Group1, Group2, Group3, Group4, Group5, Group6, Group7 and Learned. When you learn new material the application picks entries from the group Unlearned and presents the corresponding questions to the learner. The entries the learner knew the answer for get shifted to Group2 and the ones he didn't knew are stored in Group1. The higher the group, the less frequent will its entries be learned. The following list shows you how long an entry stays in its group before it is due for learning:

Entries in Group1 get repeated each time the learner taps on the Learn button. If there are no entries in Group1, the application will pick entries from the group Unlearned.


Side notes

To get the best results please ensure that you learn every day even, if it's only a short session. Ten minutes a day will show better results than a two hour session once per week.

Though the application has audio support built in, I do not have the audio files yet. They cost a lot and unfortunately I only sell a few copies per day. So, if you like the application, please go to the App Store and leave a positive review. This hopefully will result in better sales and will give me the time to keep up the development of this application. Thank you.

If you think something is not perfect (which I can hardly imagine) or if you just want to thank me (you could be the first), drop me an email or leave a comment on the blog. Have much fun and great success in learning Spanish.

Yours sincerely,
Joe.

Please also have a look at my other offerings in the App Store: