You’re starting to get a feel for grammar, when suddenly you run face-first into the dreaded declension chart—an imposing mass of data that shows us the twelve forms of a Russian noun, the sixteen ways to decline a German adjective, or sixty-five ways to conjugate a French verb. Now what? You could find sixty-five example sentences for your French verb, but what about the next verb? And the verb after that? Verb declension charts can literally fill books; I own three 550-page volumes of French, German, and Italian verb charts. If you tried to memorize every conjugation of every verb, one by
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