Guide: How I cram irregular verbs in a language

Anki Learning Effectively
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So, here’s how I managed to survive French irregular verbs - using an Anki deck I built myself.

If you don’t speak French: every irregular verb has its own conjugation pattern for each pronoun. Basically, it’s a mess.

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Here’s the setup:

• One main deck → split into decks by verb tense.

• Each tense deck → splits again into mini‑decks of verbs, each covering every pronoun in that tense.

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How the cards look:

• Front (Basic): the pronoun + audio of the infinitive.

• Back (Type in the answer): the same pronoun + its correct conjugated form.

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This way you can easily cram irregular verbs for basically every language. Yes, it takes a while to make such a deck. But the advantage is that you can repeat numerous verbs in a tense simultaneously because of the deck structure.

For those who want to use my French deck: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1640784396

· It took 33 hours for me to cram the 5 tenses in the deck, excluding passé simple.

· I do not recommend learning more than 3 verbs (21 cards) every day per tense.

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Have you thought of presenting the information as a Cloze card: i.e. each conjugated verb + pronoun is an optional Cloze. That generates 21 different cards for the card design in your first image.

This way, you are not asking for a user to understand the whole card, but to know one piece of information.

It is pretty easy to set up, if you use a spreadsheet.

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I went with type‑in because it forces active recall and spelling, which sticks better for me.

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You can combine cloze and type in Field Replacements - Anki Manual.

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Yeah, but it builds a helpful habit if you actually write out both the pronoun and the conjugation.

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But in a cloze card only one item is hidden and the rest are all visible.

However in a verb conjugation table the entries are not independent. They usually follow a pattern, so the visible parts will give away the answer to the hidden part.

So if you have, for example:

nous {{c1:aurons}}
vous {{c2:aurez}}

Then you’d have a card that looks like:

nous […]
vous aurez

But for this verb, the whole key to the future tense is simply that the stem av- changes to aur-

So with this cloze method you immediately know any answer by inspection without having to retrieve it from memory.

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