Recognition¶
The Recognition drill shows you a conjugated verb form and asks you to identify which verb it belongs to, which tense it is, and who the subject is — using three scroll wheels. It's the inverse of the Conjugation Drill: there you produce a form, here you decode one.
- Progress bar — green fill = correct answers ÷ total answered this session
- Conjugated form — the word you must identify; shown in large type
- Book icon — tap to open the full conjugation table for the correct verb (available after checking)
- Speaker icon — tap to hear the form pronounced
- VERB wheel — scroll to the verb you think this form belongs to; the correct verb plus up to 14 phonetically similar distractors are included
- TENSE wheel — scroll to the tense (Present, Preterite, Imperfect, …)
- PERSON wheel — scroll to the grammatical person (yo, tú, él/ella, …)
- Check button — submit your three-part answer; the app shows whether you are correct and, if not, lists all valid answers (some forms are identical across multiple tenses or persons)
- Skip button — move to the next question without it affecting your score
How the three wheels work together¶
All three wheels must be correct for the answer to count as right. The app picks distractors carefully:
- The VERB wheel includes the correct verb plus phonetically similar verbs from your selection — easy to slip up if you're not paying attention to the stem.
- The TENSE wheel includes only tenses you've enabled in Selecting Tenses.
- The PERSON wheel covers all six persons (yo, tú, él/ella, nosotros, vosotros, ellos).
Ambiguous forms¶
Forms shared by multiple tenses or persons
Some conjugated forms are shared by more than one combination. For example, habló is the third-person singular preterite of hablar, but hablo (no accent) is the first-person singular present of the same verb. If your answer is valid for any combination that produces this form, the app marks it right and shows the other valid answers in the explanation panel.
This is also why a form like vivimos (which is identical in present and preterite for vivir) is fair: you only need to pick one of the valid persons/tenses to score the point.
When to use Recognition¶
Recognition is the right drill when:
- You can produce common forms but stumble when reading them — typical when you've spent more time on conjugation tables than on real Spanish text.
- You want to test your ear for tense without an English prompt giving the game away.
- You're approaching a reading or listening exam and need to decode forms fast.
If you're early in a tense's learning curve and find Recognition too hard, run the Conjugation Drill in Pick mode first until producing the forms is reliable, then come back here.
Scoring and adaptation¶
Every answer feeds the local performance database. The adaptive engine prioritises verbs you keep mis-recognising, so the next session leans heavier on your weak spots.