New to this subforum

[Chez J]

My daughter is bilingual English/French. She can read and write in both languages. I am thinking of adding Spanish next year.

 

These are my thoughts. I'm told that in Spanish, the gender of nearly all words is the same as French. Spanish and French have reflexive verbs, so she'll already be able to use those well once the vocabulary word is learned. Spanish is extremely phonetic, so reading and writing should be a snap.

 

I wonder if it would be best to find a video-based program that has vocabulary building as its primary focus. See cat and say/hear gato, etc. Seems like once the vocabulary is learned all the other "grammatical stuff" from French will kick in.

 

Recommendations on a good program to accomplish this? Is this a reasonable thinking on taking Spanish after French?

 

Lesley (daughter is around 3rd in French and 6th in English)

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

I'm told that in Spanish, the gender of nearly all words is the same as French.

 

But they don't necessarily match...

 

Spanish and French have reflexive verbs

 

But they don't necessarily match...

 

You know, there's a lot more than just learning the vocab for a French speaker to be able to speak Spanish. Otherwise, everyone in France would speak both languages.

We're French speakers, I used to be fluent in Spanish, yet it took me 5 years of high school to reach that state. My kids are billingual French-English and are learning Spanish. My son barely scored 65% last year, in his first Spanish class.

 

There's vocab, idioms, sentence structures don't completely match, verb conjugations, and all exceptions...

[Nan in Mass]

I just wanted to say welcome!

[Chez J]

Cleo,this was told me by our tutor in Paris. Interesting her experience is so different from yours. That's what makes a message board such a great learning environment. Lots of info to chew on.

 

I found that our library now offers Tell Me More (Auralog?) online for free. Does anyone have experience with it? I'm going to cross-post about it.

 

Thanks.

 

Lesley

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

Cleo,this was told me by our tutor in Paris. Interesting her experience is so different from yours.

 

It is true that your daughter is in a better position to learn Spanish, than if she didn't know French. Then they would have to work on the concept of feminine/masculine, adjectives that change with their noun, verb conjugation, etc... Those concepts do carry over from one romance language to another.

But to reduce learning Spanish to a simple vocabulary exercise is not true. I can only remember the *hard* work my son had to do last year for his first year of Spanish (grade 7).

[Chez J]

It is true that your daughter is in a better position to learn Spanish, than if she didn't know French. Then they would have to work on the concept of feminine/masculine, adjectives that change with their noun, verb conjugation, etc... Those concepts do carry over from one romance language to another.

 

Ah, see you explained it better than I. This is what she meant, I think.

 

It looks from your siggie line that you are using CNED for Spanish. I'm assuming those books would be in French, which wouldn't help "me" to teach Spanish. And, I don't want to pay the tutor for French AND Spanish. But, if you've seen other programs that might be a good fit, please let me know.

 

Lesley

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

It looks from your siggie line that you are using CNED for Spanish. I'm assuming those books would be in French, which wouldn't help "me" to teach Spanish. And, I don't want to pay the tutor for French AND Spanish. But, if you've seen other programs that might be a good fit, please let me know.

 

Based from my own personal experience, you should not study a third language through your second language. The concepts get too hard eventually. Since we are indeed French speakers, I didn't even look at the myriads of Spanish programs for English speakers that are available. Take an English program that you can teach. Your daughter will go quicker on the early concepts, like your tutor said. Your DD does have a head start.