Please help me with Spanish 2

[Juliegmom]

I'm having difficulty placing my daughter in a curriculum for Spanish 2. She is currently using Rosetta Stone which is not an option for next year. A friend recently loaned me Abeka Spanish. I have levels 1 and 2. My thought was to place my dd in level 2. We have viewed the first few lessons and are concerned that there are too many gaps between Rosetta Stone and Abeka. She has not learned grammar and even the Abeka Spanish 1 book appears to have a lot of vocabulary she has not learned. I'm wondering if placing her in Abeka's Spanish 1 would be an appropriate choice for her second year of Spanish. Could this potentially be questionable if I had a college ask for specific course information? It would be helpful if we could use Abeka since we are on a tight budget, but it's not worth having my dd struggle all year. What do think?

[flyingiguana]

You need to place her where she'll learn. I wouldn't worry about a college's reaction.

 

However, my recollection about the first year of a language is that we didn't really spend any time on grammar, so it's not really unusual that grammar would only start in the 2nd year.

 

If she's learned much in Rosetta Stone, she may get through the Abeka 1 faster than expected, so it may not turn out to be a problem in the end. And you can always fudge when things happened on a transcript. Colleges are more interested in what was learned than whether it happened in a given year. For foreign language, if your daughter needs to go on and do more in college, they're just going to do an assessment test anyway.

[Jean in Wisc]

I have not yet found a school in my area that covers the entire Spanish I book in the first year. It use to be that a school would get 3 years out of their Spanish I and II books (my era)--Spanish II went about 5 chapters into book 2. Unfortunately, the trend right now is to take 2 years to get through a Spanish I textbook.

 

Often the 1st year is an introduction to basic vocab, phrases, whole-to-parts learning. The 2nd year is digging in and beginning a study of the grammar.

 

I'd suggest you go ahead with Spanish I and see how fast she can go. If she knows it, move faster. If she needs more time, slow down. It does no good to jump into Spanish II if she hasn't the background knowledge of Spanish I.

 

If she is going to have to take a Spanish entrance exam at a university, drill, drill, drill that vocabulary and be sure she knows those basic verbs that are introduced in her textbook--a lot of the most frequently used verbs are the irregulars. She needs to know them. Rosetta Stone will not give her what she needs to test out of an entrance exam (at least the older version was lacking in any real grammar).

 

The state school that my kids attend here in Wisconsin would not accept any language credit from homeschoolers. I got that wavered because I had majored in Spanish from the same school oh-so-many years ago, and I was certified to teach Spanish in Wisconsin. If this is the case with the school your daughter might be attending, you might want to find out if they take CLEPs and add that to your studies--or just consider these years of Spanish in high school a way to make those Spanish credits in college easy credits.