Ella Verbs

¡Ya estamos en fallas!

The loud, chaotic and exciting festival known as Las Fallas has begun! After being postponed in March 2020 & 2021, Valencia is going ahead with a shorter version of their month long festival this week!

Today we walked around our barrio and took some pictures to show you some of the crazy sculptures on our streets! Do you have a favorite? 😍

⚡ shoulda', woulda', coulda' ⚡en español!

Try it out below in the comments & let's see what examples you can come up with 👇

 

🥳🥳We're celebrating our 100th Update! (+ a giveaway!)🥳🥳
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We've reached a big milestone in developing Ella Verbs! And that's 100 UPDATES! There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes and the past few months we've been working on this big new update!
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💙💙To celebrate we're giving away 5 ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTIONS! How to enter? Simply comment below and tell us why you're learning Spanish!💙💙
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⭐️What's in Update #100?⭐️

💥Introducing Milestones. These additional levels not only test your conjugation skills, but challenge you to conjugate in sentences in multiple tenses. You'll need to know which tense to use and when.
💥Reflexive Verbs. We've created a full level dedicated to reflexive verbs! Learn how to conjugate them and later practise your learnings in quizzes.
💥Ser & Estar. Do you know when to use Ser and when to use Estar? If not, this bonus lesson is for you! Each milestone contains dedicated quizzes so you'll never make a mistake again!
💥Search by conjugation. We've upgraded our verb library search ability. Now you can search by verb or by conjugation!
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Let us know what you think of it!
Jane & Brian ☘️
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So great to be included in this roundup alongside apps like Memrise, Hello Talk, and HiNative! Check out this video if you're interested in using apps to learn Spanish and see why they're recommended by Antonio!

🔝 Best APPS to learn Spanish 📱 Boost your Spanish En este vídeo, te hablo de 4 aplicaciones para aprender español. Cada una de ellas se centra en un aspecto diferente. Aquí os dejo los enlaces a las apps:◼️ ...

✨Learning a new language is often romanticised but the reality of it is quite different. ✨

My experience learning Spanish started off as an exciting new opportunity at university. I studied Int’l Business, French & Spanish. French was always one of my better subjects in school & I loved the idea of learning Spanish too. So that’s what I did.

Looking back, I was extremely optimistic that starting a new language would be easy. Needless to say, anything worth doing is never straightforward, and I hit my first roadblock quite quickly. I failed my first year of uni because of Spanish, and subsequently had to repeat it. At the time I was crushed, but it was a great lesson in overcoming obstacles and I look back with fondness on this year which I used to really advance my Spanish.

In my third year of university, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to study abroad, & I went to Spain! I gained lots of confidence just by having to speak Spanish on a daily basis. It was an incredible experience and I would recommend it to anybody who has the chance to do it.

Post university, 7 or 8 years almost passed before I spoke Spanish again! At this stage, Brian and I decided to move to Spain. But before we got there, we worked and travelled in Mexico remotely. Along the way we used apps like Anki and of course Duolingo. This is also where we came up with the idea for Ella Verbs, but it would take some time for us to actually design & build it! I learned that language is like a muscle, but even if you stop training for a little while (or in my case, years), it will come back, and it will come back faster than you think.

Now that we’re living in Spain, almost 3 years have passed and speaking Spanish feels natural and I feel more confident than ever before. Day to day life has helped me to improve leaps and bounds but I am so grateful for those few years in university which are the foundation for everything I know. I try to speak Spanish as much as I can, with friends and colleagues. Practice makes perfect as we like to say!

I’m still learning & not sure it will ever end (and that’s ok!) Learning Spanish is one of the best decisions I’ve made 😊

A lovely article in The College View! Thrilled as always to receive such fantastic support from our university.

Ella Verbs - the language learning app with DCU origins – The College View Features editor Róisín Cullen, chats to the creators of a growing language-learning app. The couple reflects on their own time in DCU.

Our first ever interview together, thankfully it was with the lovely Leanne Hanafin from the DCU Alumni Office!

It nearly went without a hitch, until ~3:50 minutes in! 😆

Alumni Spotlight: Business Owners - Ella Verbs As part of November's Alumni Spotlight: Business Owners feature, Alumni Relations Officer, Leanne Hanafin sat down with Jane French (BA International Busines...

We are delighted to be featured as the November Business Owners by Dublin City University! 💥

We chatted with Leanne from the Alumni Office about our time in university and how Ella Verbs began.

Alumni Spotlight Business Owners: Ella Verbs This month, DCU Alumni Relations Officer, Leanne Hanafin chatted with November's Alumni Spotlight Business Owners, Brian Hemeryck and Jane French of Ella Verbs. Brian is a graduate of the Bachelor of Business Studies course, and Jane is a graduate of International Business and Languages at DCU. They...

Meet Jane 👋🏼

She’s the other half of Ella Verbs, our app designer 👩🏼‍🎨 and the person who replies to your social media comments and emails!

Jane studied Spanish in university, which definitely helped her to pick up Spanish faster the second time around! With a gap of ~8 years, it definitely took some work to build back her Spanish skills, and she also benefited (and still does) from the app that we built together. 📱

Jane loves all things food and travel related! She also works with her family business in Ireland remotely from Spain!

📸 Zaragoza, Spain 🇪🇸

Delighted to be recognised and supported by our university - thanks DCU & DCU Alumni 🙂💥

We are delighted to announce that our Alumni Spotlight: Business Owner feature for November is; Ella Verbs!

Two DCU Business School graduates, Jane French and Brian Hemeryck have created the brilliant app, Ella Verbs, which helps students from all over the world to learn Spanish verbs. You can download it on iOs or Android 📱

Meet Brian! 👋🏼

He’s one half of Ella Verbs, our trusty developer and the reason why Ella Verbs was founded. He, like many people, was struggling with conjugations when he started learning Spanish. He wanted a way to be able to study Spanish tenses and practice them too, in the same place! Having a little experience with apps, the side project named “Spanish app” began!

Brian is a fitness fanatic and an avid learner, so you’ll either find him outside or coding all night long! 👨‍💻 He works a full time job on top of Ella Verbs, but always seems to find time to release new updates, and fix bugs 🐜!!

📸 Guanajuato city, Mexico, 2017

Llamarse👈🏼 is probably the first reflexive verb you learned in Spanish! And you probably didn’t even realize it. 👏🏻👏🏼👏🏽👏🏾👏🏿

The first step to learning reflexives is to memorize the reflexive pronouns “me, te, se, nos, os, se”.

🤓Tip: have you ever been introduced to someone and then forgotten their name 2 minutes later? Well, you’ll probably need to ask them their name again, and here’s how you do it in Spanish using the imperfect past tense.

🇪🇸🇲🇽: Perdóname, ¿cómo te llamabas?
🇮🇪🇬🇧🇺🇸: I’m sorry, what was your name?

Soon we’ll be launching lessons in the app on reflexive verbs. Keep an eye out! 👁