lulalu Posted November 6, 2015 Share Posted November 6, 2015 Is there a reason to also teach Latin if you are a bilingual family? I keep reading the benefits of Latin. Or is it too much? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tranquility7 Posted November 7, 2015 Share Posted November 7, 2015 It might depend on your native languages, as well as your goals for language study, as well as your DC's other academics and how they are going. We are not a bilingual family, however we do study multiple languages. DS9 has been studying Latin (rigorously) for almost 4 yrs, Chinese (rigorous, but not as much as Latin) for 1 yr, and Spanish (somewhat informally) for 1/2 yr. Our goals are fluent speaking and reading (fluent speaking in Latin is obviously less important, but I work hard to conduct our Latin lesson in Latin and treat it as a spoken language for learning purposes). We began Latin first, and I chose Chinese second because I was concerned about Spanish interfering with Latin. However, because we encounter Spanish speakers so often in daily life, I finally gave in this summer and we started Spanish as well. Our experience has been GREAT. Latin has been a HUGE help in learning Spanish, and even in learning Chinese. Latin has by far the most complicated grammar of the three (at least from what we can tell so far), and so the other languages seem relatively "easy" to us in comparison. The progress we have made via informal Spanish study in just under 6 mos has been amazing, all due to Latin. If one of your native languages is an inflected Romance language, I would think Latin would be easy to add (though the benefit of it would be less). If one of your native languages is not an inflected Romance language, Latin will take more work, but the benefit would also be greater. Btw, one of the less considered benefits of Latin (at least in my experience) is the "integrative" effect of it. We study it seriously and do a lot of Latin reading and studying vocab (in addition to studying grammar) and we constantly have discussions that touch on history, culture, geography, anatomy, science, etc., all sparked by what we are learning in Latin. I have realized that it has become the great connector that underlies our whole schooling experience (and this is from someone who wasn't all that enthusiastic about Latin to begin with... I'm a total believer now, though). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Monica_in_Switzerland Posted November 7, 2015 Share Posted November 7, 2015 We are a bilingual family (two first languages for the kids), and we are required to teach German as well. I don't even want to think about Latin, but if we do, I will start no earlier than middle school- 7th grade or so, just because otherwise the language course load seems a bit overwhelming! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loesje22000 Posted November 7, 2015 Share Posted November 7, 2015 Depends on whom you are talking with, and depends on the child. We started Latin in grade 5, but maybe we should have emphasize French more at the time and start Latin in 7 as is common here for the classical track. Dutch and English are our main languages. (started before 5yo) French and Latin come next (started during elementary) Greek and German after that. (we are 3/4 of our first year of these languages, started in grade 8) DD isn't very interested in grammar and we use Latin as backbone for grammar in the other languages (except Dutch) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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