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Grammar Coverage

LinguaMorpha was built around a simple conviction: the grammar of Spanish is knowable. There are rules, the irregular forms cluster into patterns, and once you can see those patterns, the language stops feeling arbitrary. This page is a tour of the grammar LinguaMorpha drills and the ways the app makes that grammar visible.

Verb grammar

Verbs do most of the work in Spanish, and most of the difficulty for learners. LinguaMorpha covers around 1,500 verbs across the full conjugation surface.

Tense coverage

Every Spanish tense your textbook covers — and several it probably doesn't:

Indicative — simple tenses

  • Presente
  • Pretérito Imperfecto
  • Pretérito Indefinido (preterite)
  • Futuro Simple
  • Condicional Simple

Indicative — compound tenses

  • Pretérito Perfecto
  • Pretérito Pluscuamperfecto
  • Futuro Perfecto
  • Condicional Perfecto

Subjunctive — simple tenses

  • Presente de Subjuntivo
  • Pretérito Imperfecto de Subjuntivo

Subjunctive — compound tenses

  • Pretérito Perfecto de Subjuntivo
  • Pretérito Pluscuamperfecto de Subjuntivo

Imperative

  • Affirmative and negative command forms for all persons.

Non-personal forms

  • Infinitivo, Gerundio (present participle), Participio (past participle).

You can switch any tense on or off in Select Tenses, so a session can be anything from "just Presente across all verbs" to "every subjunctive tense for stem-changing verbs only".

Verb groups

Most Spanish verbs are regular — but the irregular ones cluster into recognisable groups. Drilling them by group rather than one at a time is the fastest way to internalise the patterns. LinguaMorpha's verb-group taxonomy includes:

Stem-change groups

  • e → ie (pensar, cerrar, querer, entender, preferir)
  • e → i (pedir, servir, seguir)
  • o → ue (poder, contar, volver, dormir)
  • u → ue (jugar — the only member)
  • i/u accent shift (enviar, confiar, actuar, continuar — written accent on the stem vowel in present tenses)

Yo-irregular and spelling groups

  • yo-go verbs (tener, venir, poner, salir, hacer, decir, …)
  • Spelling-change groups: c → qu before e, g → gu before e, z → c before e, gu → gü before e

Preterite / advanced groups

  • Strong preterites (tener → tuve, venir → vine, hacer → hice, poder → pude, poner → puse, querer → quise, saber → supe, estar → estuve, traer → traje, decir → dije)
  • Reflexive verbs (levantarse, vestirse, acostarse)
  • The handful of fully irregular verbs (ser, ir, haber) that have to be memorised whole

Restricted groups

  • Defective verbs and verbs used only in third-person forms (gustar, encantar, doler, …) — flagged so drills don't ask you to produce a yo form that doesn't exist.

You can select any combination of these groups — for instance, "all stem-changers" gives you one focused drill across hundreds of verbs that share the same pattern family.

How the app makes the patterns visible

Colour coding. Inside every conjugation table, only the part of a form that deviates from the regular pattern is highlighted in red. The rest stays in the default text colour. When the entire form is red, the verb is irregular as a whole (think ser, ir) and has to be memorised. When the yo form is red but everything else is plain, it's a yo-go irregular. When the stem vowel is red across the four "boot" persons (yo, tú, él, ellos) but plain in nosotros/vosotros, it's a classic stem-changer. The shape of the irregularity tells you what kind of verb you're looking at.

Tense explanations. Each tense card has an info button that opens a sheet with the endings table, usage notes, and example sentences. Available in conjugation tables and inline inside lesson screens.

Drills tuned to specific weak spots. Six dedicated test types target the parts of a verb you're most likely to forget:

  • Conjugation Drill — produce the full conjugated form (type or pick).
  • Recognition — given a form, identify the verb, tense, and person.
  • Word Meanings Flashcard — Spanish ↔ your native language.
  • Past Participle — recall the participio (with irregulars highlighted).
  • Gerundio — recall the present-participle form.
  • Indefinido — drill the yo and él preterite forms, where the strongest irregularities live.

Noun grammar

Nouns are the area learners most often try to "just memorise" — and the area where pattern recognition pays off most. LinguaMorpha covers around 1,100 nouns plus the rules and patterns that govern them.

Noun groups

Like verbs, Spanish nouns cluster into recognisable patterns. A noun typically belongs to several groups at once (e.g. lápiz is both z → -ces and accent-loss-in-plural), so the group filter lets you target very specific patterns:

Gender patterns

  • Gender traps — nouns whose gender disagrees with what the ending would predict. Mano and foto end in -o but are feminine; día, problema, sistema, tema end in -a but are masculine.
  • Greek -ema / -ama / -oma — the closed set of Greek-origin masculine nouns (problema, tema, sistema, idioma, clima, programa, diploma, …). Useful as a focused gotcha drill.
  • Feminine suffixes — -ción, -sión, -dad, -tad, -tud, -umbre, -ie, -itis (regular feminine markers).
  • Masculine suffixes — -or, -aje, -án, -ambre, -ón (mostly), and the -l/-r/-n/-s final consonants where masculine is the default.
  • Stressed a + feminine — feminine nouns starting with a stressed a- / ha- that take the masculine article in the singular for euphony: el agua, el águila, el alma, el área — but plural las aguas, las águilas, las almas, las áreas.

Pair shapes

  • Pairs — el tío / la tía, el profesor / la profesora, el chico / la chica.
  • Epicene — single form covering both genders (la persona, el bebé, la víctima).
  • Meaning-changes pairs — el capital (money) vs la capital (capital city); el orden (sequence) vs la orden (command); el cura (priest) vs la cura (cure).
  • Heteronymous pairs — different words entirely: padre / madre, hombre / mujer, yerno / nuera.

Plural class

  • Invariable — plural form equals singular: el lunes / los lunes, el paraguas / los paraguas.
  • Mass nouns — typically singular only: el agua, la leche, el dinero (though los dineros exists in restricted senses).
  • Plurale tantum — only used in the plural: los pantalones, las gafas, las tijeras, los celos.
  • Collective — plural references the pair (los tíos = el tío + la tía).

Plural formation

  • z → -ces (lápiz → lápices, luz → luces, vez → veces).
  • Accent loss in plural (canción → canciones, jamón → jamones).
  • Consonant + -es (flor → flores, ciudad → ciudades).
  • Stem change in plural — the rare cases where a vowel changes between singular and plural.

Pedagogical

  • False cognates — Spanish nouns that look like English words but mean something different (embarazada ≠ embarrassed, éxito ≠ exit, librería ≠ library, carpeta ≠ carpet). Flagged in the data so you can drill them as a separate set.
  • Regular — catch-all for the 600+ nouns with no special pattern, so "select all groups" really does mean every noun.

How the app makes the patterns visible

Drills tuned to specific noun patterns. Four dedicated noun tests:

  • Meaning Test — Spanish noun ↔ translation (the bread-and-butter drill).
  • Pick the Correct Article — el or la? A binary tap, fastest way to lock in gender.
  • Singular / Plural — given the singular, produce the plural form (drills the -s / -es / -ces rules and the accent shifts).
  • Alternate Gender Pairs — given one half of a meaning-changing pair, produce the other with the correct article.

Reference screens. Three dedicated study pages live alongside the drills:

  • Noun Gender Rules — the patterns that let you predict gender from the ending most of the time.
  • Alternate Gender Explained — every meaning-changing pair, both meanings shown side by side.
  • Plural Formation — the -s / -es / -ces rules with accent-shift examples.

Detail views. Tap any noun in any list to open a detail view with translation, the plural form, gender, CEFR level, frequency, topic tags, three example sentences, and external-dictionary lookup chips. Use it whenever a quick look would help.

Phrases and example sentences

Curated set phrases — buenos días, de vez en cuando, encantado, a pesar de — get their own section in the app. Around 240 of them, hand-tagged with CEFR level, frequency, and topic.

But the real depth comes from how the app reuses its example-sentence corpus. Every example sentence attached to a verb (around 2,400 sentences across ~800 verbs, three per verb) or a noun (around 3,300 sentences across ~1,100 nouns) is also drillable as its own phrase. That brings the Phrases pool to around 6,000 entries — every complete Spanish sentence the app already shows you in a detail view becomes something you can practice on its own.

A dedicated Example topic tag lets you toggle that whole synthesised layer on or off in a single tap, so you can drill curated set phrases in isolation or include the full corpus.

The adaptive engine

Coverage is only half the story. What makes LinguaMorpha feel different is that the app uses what it knows about you to decide what to drill next:

  • Every answer is recorded locally.
  • Unseen words appear first, ordered by significance (A1 very-common before C2 rare).
  • Once a word has been seen, it's promoted up the queue when you get it wrong and demoted when you get it right.
  • A Learning Pace setting (Relaxed / Balanced / Intensive) controls how aggressively the app introduces new material vs reviewing.

No subscriptions, no cloud, no account. Everything is on your device.

Where to next

  • Features overview — what's in the app.
  • Getting Started — install, set up voices, run your first session.
  • Recipes — worked scenarios: "I want to study Pretérito Imperfecto", "I'm going to Madrid", "I keep mixing up por and para".