Open almost any language app, pick a verb, and you will get a table with six rows: I, you, he/she, we, you-plural, they. It looks like the universal shape of a verb. It is the shape of a Spanish verb, and of Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian, which is a fair chunk of the market and none of the rest of the world.
If you are learning Korean, that table is not simplified. It is wrong.
Four ways verbs refuse to behave
Korean doesn't inflect for person at all. There is no "I go / you go / he goes" distinction in the verb. What Korean verbs do encode - and encode heavily - is politeness level and formality, which is a dimension Romance languages barely mark on the verb. Drilling six pronoun slots teaches you nothing about Korean and hides the thing you actually have to learn.
Neither do Swedish, Norwegian or Danish. Jag talar, du talar, han talar - one form, three subjects. A Swedish learner handed a six-row table spends their effort filling in five copies of the same word, which is not practice, it is transcription.
Finnish has no future tense. Not "an irregular future" - no future verb form exists. Futurity comes from context, from the present tense, and from case marking on the object. An app that offers a Finnish "future tense" drill is generating exercises for a thing that is not there.
Russian's past tense agrees with gender and number, not person. Four slots, not six, and the axis is different: я сказал if you are a man, я сказала if you are a woman. Same pronoun, different verb. Meanwhile Russian and Polish both encode aspect on the verb, which is why they do not have the preterite/imperfect split that Romance learners spend a year on - the distinction is real, but it lives somewhere else entirely.
And then there is Turkish, which distinguishes the past you witnessed (-di) from the past you heard about (-miş). No amount of Spanish-shaped drilling gets you there, because Spanish has no such contrast to map it onto.
Why apps get this wrong
Not out of laziness, usually. It is what happens when the conjugation drill is written once, for the first language shipped, and then reused. The table has six slots because Spanish has six, and every language added afterwards gets squeezed into it. The code compiles. The exercises render. A Korean learner is quietly being asked to distinguish forms that are identical.
The tell is easy to spot: if the tense list is the same for every language in the app, it was not derived from any of them.
What we do instead
Each of our 19 languages declares its own verb profile: whether it inflects for person at all, what its slots are, which slots each tense uses, and which tenses it actually has. Every drill, every grader and the mode picker itself are generated from that profile.
The concrete consequences:
- Korean, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are marked as not inflecting for
person, so instead of pronoun slots the drill teaches principal parts - the forms you genuinely have to memorise.
- Finnish simply does not offer a future tense, because there isn't one.
- The Russian past is four gender/number slots. Polish and Russian offer
no preterite/imperfect split.
- Turkish offers both pasts, separately labelled.
- The number of slots travels with the exercise, so nothing downstream assumes
six.
There is a small thing we do in the labels that matters more than it looks. Every tense name carries an English gloss in brackets - Прошедшее время (past), Παρατατικός (imperfect), Konditionaali (conditional) - because a learner has to choose a tense before they have learned the native grammatical vocabulary for it. Pronoun slots stay bare (yo, я): those are vocabulary you want to meet directly. Metalanguage gets a translation; the language itself does not.
Why this is worth the trouble
Because the alternative is an app that is confidently, invisibly wrong. A six-slot table for Danish produces exercises that are all correct and all pointless - you will pass every one and learn nothing, and there is no error message for that.
Verb tables for all 19 languages are on the site, one page per verb with every tense it has - not a page per tense, because that is not how anyone looks a verb up. You can read them without an account.