M2M Day 156: Simplifying language (via the “No Conjugation” trick)
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For April, my goal is to hold a 30-minute conversation in Hebrew on the future of technology.
Today, I didn’t have a Skype lesson. So instead, I reviewed my notes from my past two lessons, trying to identify my current biggest inefficiency.
Right now, I’m struggling most to conjugate verbs in the future tense, which is super important to this month’s challenge (since I’m trying to explicitly discuss the future).
In other words, in Hebrew, it’s much easier for me to say “I am writing a blog post right now”, which is in the present tense, versus “I will write a blog post tomorrow”, which is in the future tense.
Essentially all language programs, both inside and outside the classroom, first teach the present tense (“I am writing”). Then, teach the past tense (“I wrote”). And finally, teach the future tense (“I will write”).
Because of this sequencing, when I was in school and in Tel Aviv, I only spent about 5% of my time focusing on learning the future tense, with very little redundancy. As a result, I’ve basically forgotten how to conjugate almost all verbs in the future tense.
This seems to be my biggest bottleneck currently.
The “No Conjugation” trick
For now, rather than trying to relearn the entire future tense for all verb types, I will focus on perfecting the conjugations of connector verbs.
These verbs include:
- To want
- To go
- To be able to
- To need
- To do/to make
If I can learn these conjugations, rather than saying, “I will write tomorrow”, I can just say “I am going to write tomorrow”, which is actually a present tense conjugation (of “to go”) and the infinitive/dictionary form of the verb “to write”.
Also, rather than saying “In the future, cars will drive themselves”, I will be able to say “In the future, cars will be able to drive themselves” (This time, conjugating “to be able to” in the future tense, and keeping “to drive” in the infinitive form).
In this way, I can become masterful at conjugating these few verbs, without having to learn the conjugations of most other verbs. (Hence, the “No Conjugation” moniker).
Of course, this trick won’t work in all cases, but I think it will greatly help my conversational speed, without altering the meaning of my sentences too drastically.
I’ll practice these conjugations tomorrow, and then try out this new approach during my Friday Skype lesson.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
