Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all of you!

What a great year it was! We have finished and published our first commercial game and got all our ducks in a row for a successful 2023.

What are your goals for 2023?

If you want to learn Spanish, go and head over to the Google Play Store and download our Spanish Verb Conjugation game to hone your conjugation skills.

If puzzle games are you thing, then get in touch with us to play the very first MVP on our upcoming maze puzzle game.

Whatever you plan for 2023, we wish you much success and even more fun!

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

Happy New Year 2023!

Something we all do…

Two days ago, the word of the day was defecar (to defecate). It is something we all do. However, it is not something we usually talk about in polite conversation – and it’s unlikely to come up in Spanish class!

Verb of the day: defecar

Years ago, when I was attending daily Spanish lessons, I had a bladder infection and needed to go to the toilet every half hour. My teacher was a true hero! He noticed that something was up, so he decided to introduce us to some new vocabulary and colloquial phrases. He also explained the level (also known as age related appropriateness) of various expressions related to human biological functions. Most importantly, he included the correct phrases to use for the dreaded doctor’s visit in a foreign country.

Some of the students giggled at the time. I, on the other hand, was taking notes as if my life depended on it. In conversation after class, another student mentioned that it would have really helped them a few months earlier when they had the same issue.

That is why it is important that, sometimes, words like these are brought out and we practice them. Rather than recoiling from or giggling at a verb that may be used less often, cherish it instead. It may be important one day.

Gift Spanish Verb Conjugation for a very Merry Christmas!

Last week, I mentioned how getting back into practising Spanish Verb Conjugation daily was harder than initially anticipated. However, it was worth it, and I can already notice my improvements. Even the imperative, with which I struggled, has become easier and I now make fewer mistakes.

Over the Christmas break, I will start to re-enforce the habit by learning one more verb a day than I would do during a standard working week. After all, I want to finish this year and start next year on a high note.

How about you? Are you practising your Spanish Verb Conjugation daily?

If you’re not already using our Spanish Verb Conjugation game, then I would highly recommend it. It provides a fun, easy way to learn and revise all the most important Spanish tenses. And, once you have built the habit of daily practice, you can keep going for over 10 years with a new verb every single day – covering all the conjugation patterns and exceptions.

If you know someone else who is learning Spanish, why not gift them a Spanish Verb Conjugation app? Help them learn more easily and more efficiently, while having fun. Remember, our game works offline so you can also use it on the go to your Christmas destination.

Why not learn together? Using the “Progress” section, you can check, compare and challenge each other to complete your daily learning, revision and verb of the day goals. Learning together will provide additional motivation to practice and improve every day.

Download our game from the Google Play Store and enjoy the fun, daily practice!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.domagames.spanishverbconjugation
Photo by Engin Akyurt from Pexels

Wishing all our fans, family and friends a fabulous festive season and a fantastic 2023.

Perpetual practice makes perfect

After taking a short break from practising my verbs every day, I am pleased to say I am back to my daily practice. I even caught up on the verbs that were ready for review and waiting to be looked at for a few weeks. Big round of applause!!!

Spanish Verb Conjugation home screen

What did I learn from this though?

First of all, I was surprised by how many days I’d missed! The progress report page gives me a clear indication of when I was practising the verb of the day, learning a new verb or revising previously learned verbs. I thought I’d only missed a few days, possibly two weeks, whilst moving house – BUT – to my surprise, I didn’t have any gold stars for nearly 6 weeks! Shame on me!

Second, catching up with revising previously learned verbs is harder than I thought. The main challenge was knowing that I had to do more than my usual workload to get on top of it. So, rather than my usual workload, I tried to double it. After a few days, I noticed that I was making progress, and, before long, I was back on track.

Third, whilst revising previously learned verbs, I didn’t learn new verbs in order to manage my workload. I am now back to learning verbs again, and I am happy about it. It feels as if, at long last, I am making actual progress.

I can’t wait for the holidays to turn my daily practice into a habit and keep improving my Spanish Verb Conjugation with perpetual practice!

What is the best way to learn a language: Intentional learning

One of our users, let’s call her Jane, has provided us with feedback that she is only looking at the end of the verb to guess the correct conjugation.

OK. Let’s see what we can learn from this comment.

Jane is right in that this is one way of revising your verbs every day. It is a quick and dirty way to “get through it” too. However, it is not a great way of learning, never mind retaining what was learnt.

Sometimes, I find my mind wondering, and, similar to Jane, I only check the verb endings. However, I then find that, if I later test myself, I can’t conjugate the verbs correctly. Why is that? It is because I simply let the words pass in front of my eyes without actually taking anything in. I did not actually learn anything.

A better way of using our Spanish Verb Conjugation learning game is to learn with intention. Some aspects of intentional learning in the Spanish Verb Conjugation context are:

  • Be deliberate and motivated to learn
  • Set a specific goal every day e.g. complete the word of the day
  • Focus on reading the whole word – not only the ending
  • Say each word out loud (or just in your head) to practice pronunciation
  • If your mind wonders, bring it back to the game

That’s very much achievable.

Intentional learning is being used in the corporate setting e.g. McKinsey reports career advantages, as well as by the World Economic Forum. If it’s good enough for them, it sure is good enough for me.

Which type of learning will you choose from now on?

Download our Spanish Verb Conjugation game from the Google Play Store:

Chapurrear – “to speak a language badly”

What a great word of the day: chapurrear. It means to speak a language badly, or more precisely, to speak a language with great difficulty and making mistakes whilst at it.

We have all been there at least once. As a baby, you try your best to pick up how to form sounds that you hear around you. Over the years, you learn how to form words. Finally, you learn to put them into the right order to create sentences. Voilá! You have learned your first language. Well done!

Then comes school and (often) the need to learn a second language. This time round, you have the help of qualified teachers who start with vocabulary and grammar. If you are lucky, they throw in some pronunciation. The process of learning the second language seems a tedious task of endless repetition and rote learning. If you felt the same way, you are definitely right.

Why is it so much harder to learn a language at school?

It is harder because it deals with chunks of grammar which are not necessarily intuitive. You often don’t think about grammar when speaking your own language. Another reason why it feels harder, is timing. It takes most people around 15 to 20 years of speaking a language “naturally” all day, every single day before they are on top of their game.

When you learn a foreign language at school, depending on where you grow up, you may have 5 years of 2 hours a week for 25 weeks a year. That’s only 250 hours of classroom training! If you’re lucky you may get 9 years, or, if, after school, you go to university to study a foreign language, you may get as many as 15 years of 5 hours a week. That’s not even 2,000 hours of classroom training.

According to the US Foreign Service Institute, 600 to 750 hours is the minimum needed to learn a language that is similar to English (including Spanish!) Think about it: 750 hours is not even 9 weeks if you are learning all the time (like children do in their homes) for 12 hours a day. That’s the big difference! Learning a foreign language is hard because we try do it in only a few hours a week.

That is also the reason why tools like the Spanish Verb Conjugation game help to solidify your knowledge quickly and effectively. By spending only 15 to 20 minutes a day practising (around 2 hours a week) you’ll quickly learn many important and interesting Spanish verbs and how to conjugate them correctly. You can then also spend time reading a Spanish book or watching Spanish news or television to supplement your online learning.

Personally, I use the Spanish Verb Conjugation game to revise and learn whilst waiting for something e.g. waiting in the queue at the supermarket, waiting for the train to arrive, or simply waiting for that one friend who’s always late (if you don’t have one, could it be you?). This way, I can make the most of my time AND learn Spanish at the same time. It has already helped me to make a lot fewer mistakes, sound more fluent, and feel more comfortable.

So, what will you do today to stop “speaking Spanish badly”?

Download our Spanish Verb Conjugation game from the Google Play Store:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.domagames.spanishverbconjugation

Success: We resolved the invalid AVG threat alert

Yesterday, we reported that an invalid AVG threat alert was shown on our users’ phones. This has now been resolved. Our Spanish Verb Conjugation game is now whitelisted and no more alerts are showing on AVG. We are also proactively going through the same process of being whitelisted by other anti-virus companies.

We hope you enjoy our Spanish Verb Conjugation game: a fun, effective learning tool for mastering the art of conjugating Spanish verbs.

Spanish Verb Conjugation feature graphic

You can download it here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.domagames.spanishverbconjugation

Thanks for reporting this issue to us. Please always feel free to get in touch on feedback@doma.games and let us know about any issues you come across. We will address them as quickly as we can.

RESOLVED: Invalid AVG threat alert is being worked on

Update: The invalid AVG threat alert has been removed. Read more here.

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We value your privacy, your data and your independence. That is why we would never ask you for data or collect data from you. In fact, we don’t store any of your data at all. Moreover, we can’t even access the data you have on your phone. Only you can. You can read this on our Google Play Store Data Safety section.

Furthermore, we don’t request additional Android permissions. Other than your private learning database and settings, we don’t install or write anything to your device. You simply install our game via the Google Play Store, who also checked our game against their high standards of programming. No further access or permissions are required.

Remember, we don’t burden you with ongoing subscriptions or annoying ads. When you buy our games, you pay one price at the start and that is that. The game is yours forever. Even if we were to disappear, you would still be able to play the game without any ads forever.

That is why it came as a shock when we were informed that AVG was warning our users that our game is a threat. The message looked like this screenshot:

False AVG threat alert

The issue is that AVG is using a “whitelist” whereby each app which is not on this list is given a black mark next to its name and the threat message is shown. This happens to a lot of apps and games on the market and we happen to be one of them. 

We are working with AVG to be placed on the whitelist in order for the threat label to disappear. Our game will not change and neither will your access to it.

Remember: We will never ask you for information and we will never collect any data without asking.

Please let us know via feedback@doma.games if you see similar messages or anything confusing on your phone so that we can resolve them as quickly as possible. 

Thank you!

Today’s Word of the Day is ser: to be!

Wow! Today’s Verb of the day is ser: the most important Spanish verb. Ser is the English verb “to be”. Actually, Spanish has two verbs for “to be”: ser and estar. Learning the difference is one of the biggest challenges when learning Spanish. However, the main difference is ser means to permanently be for example: él es español (he is Spanish), because your nationality doesn’t change. While estar implies that something changed, for example: estoy en España (I am in Spain), because you weren’t in Spain earlier.

Ser is the most frequently used verb, and it is often the first verb which new students of Spanish learn in school. Ser is also one of the most irregular verbs with exceptions in the present tense, both past tenses, and in both the subjunctive and imperative moods. Of course, in English, the verb “to be” is also the most frequently used verb, and one of the few irregular English verbs.

What does this mean?

It means that learning the verb ser is likely to take a little longer, because there are more irregular spellings to keep in mind in comparison to regular verbs such as hablar (to speak). Given how often the verb is used, it is necessary to learn the conjugation and get it right.

Screenshot: verb ser (to permanently be) in our Spanish Verb Conjugation Pick From Three game.

If you want a fun and effective way to practice the conjugation of ser and 3,660 other Spanish verbs, head over to the Google Play Store  and download our Spanish Verb Conjugation game now:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.domagames.spanishverbconjugation

Go live of our Spanish Verb Conjugation game!

Our Spanish Verb Conjugation game is now released!

You can download it here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.domagames.spanishverbconjugation

Spanish Verb Conjugation is a fun learning tool for mastering the art of conjugating Spanish verbs. Your goal is to select the correct conjugation for the selected tense and specified person. To win a round, you must choose 20 correct conjugations whilst making less than 3 mistakes.

Spanish Verb Conjugation feature graphic
Spanish Verb Conjugation game screenshots

It includes all of our 3,660 verbs in order of priority; that is more than one word a day for 10 years! It includes the conjugations for the 10 most important tenses for all of these verbs. And, it sells for a one off cost of just £11.99 or equivalent (US$12.99, €14.99). There are no adds, no in-app purchases, no subscriptions, no further payments ever. Compare this to some other offers: even a book of just 501 Spanish verbs costs three times this!

Let us know what you think and get in touch with us on feedback.svc@doma.games.

Happy learning!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.domagames.spanishverbconjugation