English-Spanish lookup now recognises more inflections

Improvements have been made to the site's English-Spanish dictionary to make it recognise more English inflections. In particular:

• most irregular English verb forms are now recognised
• many plural forms are also recognised where they weren't previously.

Continuing improvements are being made to the dictionary's handling of inflected word forms. The improvements that are being made are based on an analysis of failed lookups. Future work will include not only matching an inflected word form to its base word, but also helping the user to translate that inflected word into the other language. Watch this blog for more news!

New vocabulary topic: the weather

Finally, find out how to say that it will be raining mainly on the plain, but with sunny intervals late afternoon. Well, almost. The new vocab section on Spanish weather phrases contains various adjectives and phrases useful for describing the weather in Spanish.

As well as simple present tense statements such as it's sunny, the section includes a brief summary of past tense forms of verbs commonly used for describing the weather (for example, if you're saying that the weather was sunny on holiday). A difficulty in Spanish as in many languages is deciding which of the various tenses to use (in particular between the preterite and imperfect). The new weather vocabulary section includse a brief overview of this problem with examples.

New flash card topics

Some new Spanish flash card topics have been added. You can now print your own flash cards on the topics of greetings, sport, computing.

To print the flash cards, you will generally need to print in two runs. First of all, make sure you have "Spanish only" selected as illustrated opposite. After printing the Spanish side of the flash cards, put the printed pages back into your printer the other way round and select "English only". Normally, you shouldn't need to change the order of the pages before putting them through your printer the second time: the flash card printing program will reverse the order of the pages when printing the English words on the back.

Spanish-English dictionary update

The latest update to the Spanish-English dictionary contains various new words and also includes some omissions from the previous update.

A new experimental auto-complete feature has also been added to the Spanish-English side of the dictionary. As you type a Spanish word to lool up, common Spanish words will be suggeste d that begin with the letters you have typed so far. Note that the system currently suggests only fairly common words, not every single Spanish word possible. Generally, only "base" forms (singulars of nouns, infinitives of verbs) are suggested. However, a small number of common inflected forms are also suggested.

Updates to Spanish grammar section

Firstly, a few of the Spanish grammar section of the Español-Inglés web site have been updated. Principal updates include:

• expansion of the section on the imperfect tense, with on-line imperfect tense exercises and information on when to use the imperfect tense including when to use the simple vs continuous forms of this tense;
• a section on the future tense, again with simple future tense exercises to do on-line;
• a section on the Spanish conditional tense with on-line exercises to allow you to practise conditional verb forms;
• more information on when to use continuous verb forms in Spanish (and when not to use them!).

Another section of the Spanish Grammar section which is currently being extended is the material on the Spanish subjunctive. Several new pages are already available summarising and exemplifying the main uses of the subjunctive, with more on the way soon. Watch this space...