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.

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1131659186

> … 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

If you can read Russian, there is a Python app for morphological analysis called pymorphy3. Documentation: https://pymorphy2.readthedocs.io/en/stable/.

It is based on an OpenCorpora dictionary: https://opencorpora.org/dict.php

This dictionary is based on a Zaliznyak dictionary, which is always referenced in Wiktionary's articles.

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.

You might be able to build something similar yourself using declension data extracted from Wiktionary using wiktextract: https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract#pre-extracted-data

https://memrussian.com/?

Do you happen to still have a link to this software?