BJU Spanish?

[gingersmom]

BJU has a very expensive (nearly $400) Spanish program.

 

Has anyone used it and would you recommend it?

 

My daughter is driving me batty with Spanish. :banghead: I can't decide if she is the problem (most likely) or the book we are using.

[Michelle in AL]

We are using it without the CD's. I speak very little spanish, took a couple years in both high school and college. Here are the cons to using this for our family:

 

Frustrating because it includes words on tests that weren't ever introduced before. This happens every once in a while.

 

There is a tremendous amount of vocabulary. They do tell you what they want to stress that week, but we try to learn all new words.

 

It is a lot of work for me as a mom: I have to translate the entire chapter every week in order to learn the vocabulary. There is a translation for MOST of the chapter in the back of the TM, but I can't keep flipping back and forth during our reading of the page long dialogue that opens each lesson. My method is to translate each lesson on the weekend and try to study it a couple times during the week so when the kids ask me what a word means I don't always respond with a dumb look of :confused:

 

I can't speak it fluently, so the lessons sound pitiful.

 

We found we have to keep up with the activity book and online grammar supplementary work to retain new words and concepts.

 

I've used Visual Spanish, SOS Spanish and BJU. I've come to the conclusion that they all require you to learn a great deal of vocab.

 

Our solution is to muddle through this yr and do an online class next yr.

[Guest HannahC]

My dd's 15 and 12 do BJU Spanish online with The Potter's School. The Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 books are good, but the Spanish 3 one is terrible (dd15's teacher actually apologized to the class for it). There is a lot of vocabulary in all of them, but when dd15 went to Guatemala this past December she was shocked at how much of the random vocabulary she had learned that she needed to use.

[Lizzie in Ma]

With the dvds (she is doing all BJU dvd this year) and she really likes it and it enthusiastic about it.

 

Drawback: It is an old homesat course so the schedule of lessons is a pain but that isn't a big deal. There are students calling in with questions and while there is no classroom per se, Mr. Cancino is speaking to a number of students.

The first few classes made her bonkers due to most of them being instructions to the students in schools streaming the course and the "stupid" questions they were asking. lol

On occasions he makes mistakes and does not correct them as he continues.

 

So far we would both recommend the course. She says she is learning a great deal more than she would have learned on her own.

 

That having been said, I found these free things that could work.

Spanish Resources, Courses and textbooks

http://www.studyspanish.com/freesite.htm

 

http://www.multilingualbooks.com/freelessons-spanish.html

here are listed every possible Spanish resource on the net you could imagine

[Julie in MN]

Using a textbook program such as BJU or ABeka will have the problem that by year 2, all of the teaching materials, directions, etc., are in Spanish.

 

Not sure about the video course, as we didn't try that.

Julie