I’m trying to learn Italian. One of my practice activities is to try to read things written in Italian. Since I’m at the beginning of the learning curve, I’ll recognize a few words then flip-flip-flip through the translation dictionary to figure out the next one. This works great with nouns and certain other parts of speech, but verbs can be difficult. Can you imagine someone who doesn’t speak English coming across the word “is” or “was”? How do you look that up in a translation dictionary when it has no resemblance to the base form of the verb, “be”?
Somehow, I stumbled upon the website http://www.verbix.com. I must say, I love the Verbix Verb Finder. Enter the word “was”, for example, and it tells you:
Dutch was, inflected form of “wassen”
Dutch was, inflected form of “zijn”
English was, inflected form of “be”
Gothic was, inflected form of “wisan”
Middle High-German was, inflected form of “sîn”
Middle High-German was, inflected form of “wësen“
You can click on the links it gives, and Verbix will take you to a full conjugation of that verb. You can go the other direction as well. If you know the base form of a verb already and want to conjugate it, just use the Verbix On-line Verb Conjugator. At this writing, they have 66 languages in their system.
Verbix is my one-stop shop for foreign language verbs.
