Him, Her and Ella

By Anders Nilsson

Jane French and Brian Hemeryck are a husband and wife team from Ireland – living in Spain – who have built a Spanish verb conjugation learning app called Ella Verbs, which has an enviable user rating on both the Apple and Google Play app stores.
/https://ellaverbs.com/

The couple has an interesting and varied background, but they ended up living in Spain about three years ago. Before then, they were living in Vancouver but wanted to be closer to Ireland so they could see family and friends more often.

As Jane had previously studied Spanish and had always wanted to be fluent in a language, Spain felt like a great place to relocate to and would provide the opportunity to work on the language. As they had visited Valencia when Jane was on an Erasmus course, and loved the city, that’s where they settled.

Ella Verbs is a mobile app available on iOS and Android that helps users learn how to conjugate Spanish verbs. For example, how to say: “I will talk”, “we used to talk”, “you would talk”, or “she talks”. This is one of the more difficult parts of learning Spanish – while in English, there are generally only 4 possible variations of a verb to learn, in Spanish it will be a minimum of 46!

The app has a unique approach to teaching this: guiding users through 30 levels of bite-sized lessons and quizzes, covering the 16 major tenses and 1000+ verbs.

They have over 500 reviews and maintain an average rating of 4.8 and 4.9 out of 5 stars on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store respectively. Here’s a recent review:

“Amazing app. I’ve learned more about conjugating verbs in 24 hours than I’ve learned in three weeks of 1:1 Spanish lessons with a tutor. It’s straightforward and it’s so easy to understand. A must for anyone wanting to learn Spanish.”

The app is free to download, including all present tense levels and a fully translated verb library for free. Users can then decide to upgrade (via monthly & annual subscriptions or a one-time lifetime purchase) to continue learning additional tenses and get access to 900+ more verbs.

When they decided to move to Spain 3 years ago, Brian started to learn Spanish from scratch. He used Duolingo to get the basics down but soon ran into a wall with understanding verbs. Jane, having studied Spanish at university, started creating Excel spreadsheets of lessons and quizzes for him.

This helped him immensely, and because there were no guided verb apps out there, they recognised an opportunity to fill a need. Jane had recently completed a part-time design course, and Brian had built some mobile apps as side projects before. It was the perfect match of design and development skills (and timing!), so they decided to make an app!