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Grammar Coverage

LinguaMorpha was built around a simple conviction: the grammar of these languages 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, module by module, and the ways the app makes that grammar visible.

Each module is deep in its own way and is self-contained: study Latin for Latin, Spanish for Spanish, neither one depends on the other. They share an engine, not a syllabus.

Latin

Latin gets the deepest morphological coverage in the app because Latin's morphology is itself the deepest — five declensions, five adjective patterns, six tenses across two systems, every form macron-accurate. Catalogue at v1.0:

  • ~300 verbs across all five conjugations
  • ~270 nouns across all five declensions
  • ~150 adjectives across all five patterns
  • 11 pronouns with full case×number×gender paradigms
  • 29 numerals

Verb grammar

Every classical tense, mood, and voice the morphology engine can derive — drilled with the same Setup / Study / Test pipeline as Spanish.

Indicative — present system (active + passive)

  • Praesēns
  • Imperfectum
  • Futūrum

Indicative — perfect system (active + passive — periphrastic with PPP + esse)

  • Perfectum
  • Plūsquamperfectum
  • Futūrum Exactum

Subjunctive — every tense (active + passive)

  • Praesens Subjūnctīvus
  • Imperfectum Subjūnctīvus
  • Perfectum Subjūnctīvus
  • Plūsquamperfectum Subjūnctīvus

Imperative

  • Praesens (the everyday "do this!")
  • Futūrum (formal / legal register — Twelve Tables, prayers, philosophical maxims)
  • Plus their passive counterparts

Non-finite forms

  • Six infinitives (three tenses × two voices)
  • All four participles (Praesens Āctīvum, Perfectum Passīvum, Futūrum Āctīvum, Futūrum Passīvum / Gerundīvum)
  • Gerundium (verbal noun)
  • Supīnum (acc. -um for purpose, abl. -ū for respect)

You can toggle any tense on or off in Select Tenses, the same way Spanish works.

Noun grammar

All five declensions are first-class:

  • First (-a / -ae, mostly feminine): puella, aqua, rosa
  • Second (-us / -ī or -um / -ī, mostly masculine or neuter, plus the -er masculine sub-pattern): servus, bellum, puer
  • Third (varies / -is, all genders) — including the i-stem sub-pattern (urbs, cīvis, mare) and the -or → masculine convention with feminine exceptions (arbor) all handled explicitly
  • Fourth (-us / -ūs, mostly masculine, with notable feminine manus, domus): exercitus, fructus
  • Fifth (-ēs / -ēī, almost all feminine): diēs, rēs

Selection grain: the Setup picker lets you scope the drill pool to whichever declensions you want active. Two irregular nouns (vīs, Iuppiter) sit outside the picker because their paradigms aren't auto-generated; both are listed in a footnote so you can see what's excluded.

Adjective grammar

All five textbook patterns:

  • 1st/2nd-decl (-us / -a / -um): bonus, magnus — masc 2nd-decl, fem 1st-decl, neut 2nd-decl
  • 1st/2nd-decl -er (-er / -a / -um): pulcher, miser, sacer — same shape but the masc nominative drops -us
  • 3rd-decl two-ending (fortis / forte): masc + fem share a form, neut takes -e
  • 3rd-decl one-ending (ingēns, gen. ingentis): identical across genders in nom., distinct paradigm via genitive stem
  • 3rd-decl three-ending (ācer / ācris / ācre): three distinct nominative singulars

Comparative + superlative derivation: every adjective produces its comparative (-ior / -ius) and superlative (-issimus / -ior + -rimus for -er stems / -illimus for facilis-family). Irregulars (bonus → melior → optimus, magnus → maior → maximus) are stored explicitly.

Pronouns and numerals

Both surfaced as top-level Grammar categories.

Pronouns — eleven all-irregular paradigms grouped by pedagogical class:

  • Personal: ego, tū, suī (reflexive)
  • Demonstrative: is, hic, ille, iste, ipse, īdem
  • Relative: quī
  • Interrogative: quis

Numerals — 29 cardinal numbers. Three decline fully (ūnus / duo / trēs) and get the full paradigm view; the rest (quattuor through centum, plus mīlle) are indeclinable and surface as a reference card with the citation form.

How the app makes Latin patterns visible

Macron-accurate answer checking. The default check is lenient — rosa counts as right when rōsa is expected, with a gentle reminder. A toggle in Preferences switches to strict mode for users who want vowel length in their muscle memory.

Sentence parser. Paste any Latin text into Self Study → Identify a Form (sentence mode); every word becomes a tap-through chip with its full parse. Handles enclitics, capitalisation, punctuation, and macron-folded matches.

Concordance drill. Show a Latin sentence with a blank where an adjective should go; the noun is rendered in its inflected form; the learner picks the adjective form that agrees. Wrong-answer feedback explains which axis (gender / number / case) was off.

Auto-generated example sentences. Every noun and adjective gets 3 sentences piped through the concordance template library — focus form bolded, case + number tag below. Hand-curated examples take precedence where they exist.

Spanish

A complete Spanish study system in its own right — fully wired into the same Setup / Study / Test pipeline as Latin, with around 1,100 verbs, 1,300 nouns, and 6,000 phrases. Nothing in this module assumes you know any Latin.

Verb grammar

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.

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 Spanish 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 1,300 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 traps — mano / foto end in -o but are feminine; día / problema / sistema end in -a but are masculine.
  • Greek -ema / -ama / -oma — the closed set of Greek-origin masculines.
  • Feminine suffixes — -ción, -sión, -dad, -tad, -tud, -umbre, -ie, -itis.
  • Masculine suffixes — -or, -aje, -án, -ambre, -ón (mostly).
  • Stressed a + feminine — el agua, el águila, el alma (singular only).
  • Pairs — el tío / la tía.
  • Epicene — single form for both genders.
  • Meaning-changes pairs — el capital (money) vs la capital (capital city).
  • Heteronymous pairs — padre / madre, hombre / mujer.
  • Invariable plural — el lunes / los lunes.
  • Mass nouns — typically singular only.
  • Plurale tantum — los pantalones, las gafas.
  • Plural formation rules — z → -ces, accent loss, consonant + -es.
  • False cognates — embarazada ≠ embarrassed.

Drills. Four dedicated noun tests: Meaning, Pick the Correct Article, Singular / Plural, Alternate Gender Pairs. Plus three reference screens (Gender Rules, Alternate Gender Explained, Plural Formation).

Phrases and example sentences

Around 240 curated set phrases plus around 5,700 example sentences synthesised from the verb and noun catalogues — every verb / noun example sentence is also drillable as its own phrase. That brings Phrases to ~6,000 entries total. A dedicated Example topic tag toggles the synthesised layer on or off.

The adaptive engine (cross-module)

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.

(Adaptive learning is fully wired for Spanish in v1.0; Latin drills work the same way but write to the performance database in a follow-up release.)

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 Latin's 3rd declension", "I want to study Pretérito Imperfecto", "I keep mixing up por and para".