What languages do you (or are you planning on teaching)?

[SnegurochkaL]

My daughter is learning French and some Latin. This year we are doing French, Latin, adding German and Russian. She was going to German K so this year it is time to go to German school on Saturdays. Russian is her second language so we are just going to make her studies formal. I will be adding Greek and Japanese to previously mentioned languages withing next 2 years. Around middle/ high school she might learn some Mandarin Chinese and/or Castilian Spanish.

 

I am going to study French/German together with my daughter and improving my Japanese:)

[Rosie_0801]

I'm probably doing it wrong :001_huh:, but my dd seriously resists using Little Bear and other books like that. She reads at a 5th grade level in Dutch and the stories in Little Bear etc are just not interesting enough for her, but her vocabulary is so small that she can't read the books she would like to read (Narnia for example). I read to her in English everyday, but I'm not convinced that that is doing much. We also started old-fashioned flash card drill last week, because I just could not think of anything else to try.

 

I'd try dvds. In theory, my dd is a native English speaker, but she is language delayed (because she wants to be, it seems) but learns far, far, far more from watching dvd repeats than she does from me. I just can't make myself repeat the same thing 200 times a day and if I talk too much, she tells me to shh. :glare: I know they say kids don't learn language by watching telly, but in my experience that is quite different to movie repeats.

 

I got her an Auslan dvd to try and encourage that. It has a chap signing, a voice over and a video clip of the word. That improved her Auslan, but really kick started her English again. Now when she watches movie repeats she tries to speak along with the characters. I'm starting to see her bring what she is learning there into what passes for conversation from her, if they are words and phrases I commonly use. Phrases like "there you go" she uses. There are some isolated words from movies she uses only when she is play acting and copying them, but not in regular conversation. I guess they will come.

 

Perhaps if you and your daughter make a game of trying to speak along with characters from her favourite movies, she will feel encouraged. The movies seem to work for my kiddie because the visual element provides context that I can't replicate in every day life because we can't stand in the bathroom talking about washing our hands for 3 hours a day. She's also a very independent soul and I think that the dvds provide her with practice that doesn't involve me is part of the attraction.

 

Rosie

[mammaofbean]

the kids are doing mandarin and spanish now. i outsource these. my daughter who is five wants to add french, but i told her we can think about it in a couple of years when she has more of the basics for the first two down. and possibly after my sister who is fluent in french moves back to the states. i am hoping to start latin in second or third grade.

[Mommee & Baba]

Eventually Spanish and German

[Dmmetler]

Whatever my DD wants. So far, that's been Spanish (casually, since about age 2) and Latin. She wants to do Greek next, because she sees the alphabet on the fraternity houses:001_huh: (the joys of raising a college faculty brat. I can't complain too much-I spent my summer vacations on college campuses too) and because she saw the ad for SSG in her Latin book.

 

She also loves picking up words in other languages, which has included bits of Italian, Hindustani, Arabic, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, Russian, Polish and Mandarin. In general, anyone with a non-American accent isn't safe, especially not if she hears them speaking in another language, and she's made a lot of friends of restaurant bus boys, graduate students at my college, and engineers at my husband's company by asking them about their home languages (some of my husband's co-workers have brought my DD books and CDs back in Arabic and Hindustani).

 

We recently discovered that the Songs section of Discovery Education has the Twin Sisters vocabulary songs in a bunch of European languages, which has had my DD happily listening and comparing Italian, German and French to English and Latin.

 

I'm really not sure where to go from here. I went through years of having my speech be almost incomprehensible (I was in speech therapy for over 16 years-and still have the phonemic production of a 4 yr old), so languages were never a focus for me. I took Latin in high school mostly because I wasn't expected to speak it. I did learn to sing in several languages in college, and can read well enough to get through a newspaper or a popular magazine in Spanish or French, but that's about where my skills stop.

[Saille]

Latin and Greek, both for etymological reasons and to study the works of the ancients in the original languages. Ds8 wants to learn Mandarin at some point; this is directly tied to his paleontological ambitions. When the kids are older, I'm toying with the idea of picking up an immigrant ancestor language...Gaelic or Slovak. (Me, I mean. Not necessarily them.) One nice thing about doing classical languages is that it makes the idea of dipping my toe into a new language just to check it out seem much more...normal? No big deal.

Edited July 9, 2010 by Saille