Monthly Archives: May 2014

The Irregular Verbs app appeared on the App Store several days ago. It took almost 2 weeks for me to prepare it – the longest among all other quizzes. The reason is the vast database: there are 206 distinct verbs in the app and for each verb, I had to find an English definition and a translation to 8 languages. The topic itself is competitive, there are dozens of apps about irregular verbs on the App Store, but none of them use the “letter quiz” approach and after the first days, my app shows promising figures.

The English description of the game is the following:

Begin – began – begun…
The app contains all important English irregular verbs (more than 200 verbs overall). Please choose the learning method that suits you the best.
* Learn by spelling three verb forms: infinitive, past simple, and past participle
* Guess the verb from its definition
* Learn verbs with the help of flashcards

It is an essential app for everyone learning the English language!

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There are 3 modes in the app: 1) the first one is universal for all languages; the infinitive (“the first form”) of an irregular verb is given and the user has to spell the two other forms: past simple and past participle. In this mode, I excluded some longer verbs (such as understand/understood) and the verbs for which alternative spellings of inflected forms exist.
2) The second mode depends on the language settings of the device. If the language is English or any language I don’t localize to, the mode is called “Guess the verb” and a short definition of a verb is given, the user has to spell the infinitive form. If the user’s language is Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, or Dutch, the question is not a definition but a translation of an English verb into that language. The answer is still an English infinitive, even the order of the answer is the same. This type of question may not be directly related to the verb irregularity. It is a separate tool for language learning, I can code any word in such a way. The knowledge that the answer is an irregular verb is just an additional hint.
3) Finally, there are flashcards that show all the above info for all 206 verbs that I decided to include in the first version of the app.

I estimate that there are about 150 basic irregular verbs in the English language. Several of them are archaic, and I don’t use them myself and don’t encounter in the texts I read (“lade”, “beget”). Then there are about 30 verbs which are often conjugated as regular (“shave”, “learn”). In many cases, the frequency of the usage of regular vs irregular form varies between British English and American English. And using prefixes, one can create multiple derived verbs that are also considered irregular (“overtake”, “babysit”). The longest list of irregular verbs I’ve seen had 470 words.

Acknowledgements:
icons for buttons were downloaded from iconmonstr or were created with Font Awesome.

Thanks!