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If your goal is to teach two languages to mastery, how would you stagger?


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DS is 9 and we are focusing on French right now. Doing an intensive class this summer and I hope to find a tutor for 1:1 lessons this fall through the next academic year. My goal is to be at least at an intermediate level by next summer. I am teaching him now, because I am at an intermediate level myself currently. We do a little bit of French every day, 6 days a week.

 

My goal is to learn Arabic with him once French is on some sort of autopilot (I am not sure what this autopilot would look like. It certainly takes a lot of resources, mental and otherwise, to see progress).

 

When would you start the second language, in this case?  Part of me wants to maximise this compliant age/ period before he realises he can just tell me "no, I am not doing that", LOL.  Thanks for any thoughts.

 

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In my home country, the first foreign language is introduced in 3rd grade and the second foreign language is begun in 6th grade. (When I went to school, I started the first language in 3rd and added the second in 5th) By graduation, fluency has been achieved in both languages. Proficient teachers are a must; it is extremely rare for students to achieve fluency without a fluent teacher.

 

I never found studying two languages confusing. Mine were very dissilar with different alphabets, as would be the case for you. I woudl be more concerned about staggering with similar languages; I would put a lot more space between French and Italian than between French and Arabic.

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I say get French to a strong, intermediate level of speaking, listening, reading and to a lesser degree writing. Begin learning to Read Arabic (do you have any experience with Arabic?) and build some decent reading (sounding words out skills) with Arabic and then pursue Arabic moderately for 2 years while you cement French then switch to doing Arabic intensively for a couple of years.

 

Do you need a secular Arabic curriculum or would one with Islamic/religious references be okay?

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I say get French to a strong, intermediate level of speaking, listening, reading and to a lesser degree writing. Begin learning to Read Arabic (do you have any experience with Arabic?) and build some decent reading (sounding words out skills) with Arabic and then pursue Arabic moderately for 2 years while you cement French then switch to doing Arabic intensively for a couple of years.

 

Do you need a secular Arabic curriculum or would one with Islamic/religious references be okay?

Thanks so much. I know very little about Arabic, I have a couple of classes (not entire courses, just very basic introductory classes) under my belt.

 

Some Islamic references are OK. We are agnostic, but I think they have cultural value and also we tolerate Christian references in everyday life with no incident.

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I say get French to a strong, intermediate level of speaking, listening, reading and to a lesser degree writing. Begin learning to Read Arabic (do you have any experience with Arabic?) and build some decent reading (sounding words out skills) with Arabic and then pursue Arabic moderately for 2 years while you cement French then switch to doing Arabic intensively for a couple of years.

 

Do you need a secular Arabic curriculum or would one with Islamic/religious references be okay?

 

I'd be interested in any curriculum you might know of with GCC arabic.  

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We are doing Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic concurrently. Right now we have a Chinese tutor who comes once a week, the other languages we are studying our own. I speak Spanish but not Arabic, eventually I hope to find a tutor for that one. I would also be interested in any curriculum recommendations, I don't mind Islamic references.

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I agree that languages that are dissimilar are easier to o study concurrently. That one reason I picked the languages I did. I have one child who wants to study French,  I let him do what he wants with it on his own but prefer to emphasize Spanish right now.

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We are doing Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic concurrently. Right now we have a Chinese tutor who comes once a week, the other languages we are studying our own. I speak Spanish but not Arabic, eventually I hope to find a tutor for that one. I would also be interested in any curriculum recommendations, I don't mind Islamic references.

Hi, mind sharing how your study plays out daily? What i mean is, how much time each week, what resources, whether you are seeing progress, and whether your family is more advanced in some languages than others? Feel free to PM me if that's easier.

 

I really want to do a 2-3 week summer intensive at a local uni to kick off our Arabic studies next summer, since we are both at level zero. I don't think they'd let my 10 year old attend though, sigh.

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DS is 9 and we are focusing on French right now. Doing an intensive class this summer and I hope to find a tutor for 1:1 lessons this fall through the next academic year. My goal is to be at least at an intermediate level by next summer. I am teaching him now, because I am at an intermediate level myself currently. We do a little bit of French every day, 6 days a week.

 

My goal is to learn Arabic with him once French is on some sort of autopilot (I am not sure what this autopilot would look like. It certainly takes a lot of resources, mental and otherwise, to see progress).

 

When would you start the second language, in this case?  Part of me wants to maximise this compliant age/ period before he realises he can just tell me "no, I am not doing that", LOL.  Thanks for any thoughts.

 

If both languages are to be spoken, and require pronunciations which are different from the native tongue, I might start with pronunciation exercises in both languages earlier.  I feel there is a "window" that closes somewhere around fourth grade, after which it is much, much harder to learn to speak new languages.  They can still learn vocab and grammar later, but a few months of learning what the language sounds like, and how to recite it make a world of difference.

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My son does an online course in Latin (the Middlebury one that is part of the K-12 curriculum). He has been taking French for a year and has a private tutor, plus we have the French Bouquet package on Dish, so he watches French cartoons and other French programming. He doesn't seem to get the two languages mixed up.

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Hi, mind sharing how your study plays out daily? What i mean is, how much time each week, what resources, whether you are seeing progress, and whether your family is more advanced in some languages than others? Feel free to PM me if that's easier.

 

How our study plays out daily? Imperfectly. I have tried a variety of schedules and rotations, but we seem to always fall back on making one language the primary focus for a time while working primarily on review and maintenance in the others. Right now Mandarin is our primary focus. Dd10 is my oldest and the one who studies most consistently. In addition to the weekly tutoring sessions, she does several sessions a week with Fluenz on the computer. I try to review with everyone once or twice a week what was covered during tutoring, and the younger kids sometimes watch a video or play with a Chinese app.

 

Right now Arabic and Spanish are primarily reviewed during our morning memory work time. We haven't finished learning the alphabet yet for Arabic, so I try to work on that and review some phrases and words we learned from the Michel Thomas CD 's. We haven't been actually learning much new recently. For Spanish, we have learned some songs etc. And review those, I need to come up with something more formal. Dd10 was working through Getting Started With Spanish last year and is planning to get back to that soon. We have picture books in Spanish that I sometimes read aloud. We focused more on Spanish and Arabic last year, Chinese has taken front seat since we found a tutor.

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We also go back and forth between a focus language. My son's first language is English, but my husband is French Canadian, so French was a priority. I also wanted my son to learn Spanish and Hebrew. He went to French immersion preschool 3 days per week, Spanish immersion preschool 2 days per week, and Hebrew school one day per week. He has no issues learning 4 languages simultaneously. The earlier the better, IMO.

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Here is what I am tentatively planning on doing with mine:

  • Spanish to some fluency. Right now, we watch Spanish language children's television as available to us. We read a lot of children's books in Spanish. My oldest took 2 years of Spanish in public school and has memorized some songs in Spanish. He has expressed an interest in learning Japanese and we are looking into starting him in a Japanese course in a year or two if he is still interested.
  • If my children are interested in learning a third language during their logic stage, I plan on having them use Spanish to springboard into learning their next language. For example, if DS1 wants to learn Japanese, he will be using Spanish language resources to do so. Next year, he will be attending Spanish tutoring through a friend at church. After he completes that, we will look into tracking down Spanish-Japanese resources for him to use the next year to learn Japanese.
  • We have considered having our son learn Korean first, then Japanese. Korean is easy to learn to read and will be simpler for him to pick up, I believe. It will introduce him to the look of Asian languages and the sounds, without the stress of tonal Chinese or the weirdness of Japanese. Then he can use Korean to learn Japanese or Chinese if he wants.

I don't plan on doing another language for awhile. I have my hands full at the moment. Plus I don't know any other languages besides English and some Spanish.

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[*]If my children are interested in learning a third language during their logic stage, I plan on having them use Spanish to springboard into learning their next language. For example, if DS1 wants to learn Japanese, he will be using Spanish language resources to do so.

I LOVE this idea, I'm going to try to implement this with my children, I'd never thought about this, I just had an aha moment! Thank you!!
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I took the approach of doing one language using a textbook and the other immersion style.  This had its drawbacks lol, but it was much more do-able, time and effort wise.

 

I can tell you what "maintenance" might look like (thanks to Joan in Geneva).  Once we began using a history book from France, reading the text aloud, doing a bit of discussion, and writing the essays in French, French was pretty much self-maintaining.  The French use a nice 4-year history cycle with textbooks that run from 6th - 9th grades.  (We used them in high school.)  That, combined with some summer programs and travel and doing a book in French (French lit) for great books (English) made a pretty good maintenance program.  Meanwhile, he worked on Latin using a textbook.

 

Nan

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I've never laid eyes upon this text, nor read any reviews, but the local university uses this in their summer intensives:

Al-Kitaab (2004)

This book is probably not best for self study. Nor for a younger crowd. I have this book (which comes before it and introduces the alphabet and some grammar/vocab): http://www.amazon.com/Alif-Baa-Third-Edition-Introduction/dp/1589016327/ref=pd_sim_b_2  and it is also not for self study. I took my DS9 through it but the dvd with it is ok, not great.

 

I would start with this series: Key to Arabic and then Gateway to Arabic. You can get them (along with the audio files needed) for free here: http://www.kalamullah.com/learning-arabic.html (HINT: scroll down and  right click on the link you want to download and save to disk, the site can be slow sometimes. The site is Islamic and those particular books, to my recollection, contain a few references to words from the Qur'an, but are not Islamic lessons per se, iykwim.)

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I took the approach of doing one language using a textbook and the other immersion style. This had its drawbacks lol, but it was much more do-able, time and effort wise.

 

I can tell you what "maintenance" might look like (thanks to Joan in Geneva). Once we began using a history book from France, reading the text aloud, doing a bit of discussion, and writing the essays in French, French was pretty much self-maintaining. The French use a nice 4-year history cycle with textbooks that run from 6th - 9th grades. (We used them in high school.) That, combined with some summer programs and travel and doing a book in French (French lit) for great books (English) made a pretty good maintenance program. Meanwhile, he worked on Latin using a textbook.

 

Nan

I would love to hear your recommendations for French maintenance books of that sort.

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I would love to hear your recommendations for French maintenance books of that sort.

 

We used Hachette's Histoire/Géographie 6e through 3e.  We ordered it through Schoenhoff's, in Cambridge, because they were able to order the teacher guide.  I was not because I have no teacher id#.  Remember, France has a national curriculum.  There are several publishers of approved-by-the-French-government-for-use-in-schools textbooks.  We chose this one because Joan in Geneva had looked at a few of them and said that the teacher's guide for this one included sample essays, which was something *I* needed in order to use the textbook.  If you don't need sample essays, then you might want to look at the samples available on different publisher's websites.  If the book had been in English, I would not have needed the answer key.  We also used Français 6e.  This was a language arts book (their version of an English book) and some other "English" books.  It included practice writing short reports and essays, practice reading a variety of materials such as magazine articles, directions, poetry, biography, and fiction.  It included passages from various famous works.  LOL My son (who is in college now) says that he learned a lot of language arts from the book but not much French.  Actually, I think he learned a lot of French, too, but he didn't realize it because it was only a small stretch, French-wise, unlike some of the other stuff we read for literature, like Tristan et Iseult.

 

I can't say enough good things about this approach and I will be forever grateful to Joan in Geneva for suggesting it (waving madly and sending hugs if you are reading this, Joan ).  By doubling up, I managed to give my engineering-oriented son a second language he can actually USE, all the while devoting only a little time to French alone.  A typical high school day for my son included math, science, literature (a la TWEM), writing, history, music, Latin or some sort of extra technical thing, and an independent project.  (He also did a fair amount of long-term (like weeks or months) traveling, to which we added some reading and writing to make a class.)  Notice the lack of French?  That is because when we did French grammar or when we did Français 6e, we did it instead of writing (since it contained lots of writing), the history book was in French, and the French reading (which is the easiest way ever of maintaining a language) we did during literature, pretending it was in English.  With a non-technically oriented child, whose science would take less time and who would not be doing all those technical projects, there would be time to do more languages.  My son dabbled in Japanese and tried Arabic.  My son also did gymnastics, which some years was a huge time commitment.

 

We used Grammaire Progressive du Français: Niveau intermédiare for grammar.  This works best if you know French.  The book isn't written in English.

 

YOU CAN DO IT.  Even in high school.  You just have to double up.  There will be some point at which you need to spend an extended amount of time immersed in the language (summers are good for this - foreign summer camp or language camp in the origin country or visiting relatives, or you can be an exchange student).  There will probably be a point at which you need an outside language teacher, if you aren't fluent in the language yourself.  The big difference between a "real" teacher and myself was how fast progress was made.  A real teacher can do wonders. (My recommendation is to do this sooner rather than later.)  The other thing you should seriously consider doing is reading real books in the language.  Unlike most US schools, in Europe, people seem actually to be able to use the languages they have studied.  The biggest difference I can see (from my rather sketchy research) is how soon they make the students read real books.  This is basically immersion, and it can be done with something like TinTin books as soon as the student has a little of the language.  You don't have to wait until the student is fluent.  With a year of community college Spanish and a dictionary, I can read fairy tales.  Reading books somehow turns the language from a school textbook thing into real, useful language.  It works best if student looks up unknown words in a French dictionary, one that has the definitions in French.  (We got a cheap one by buying last year's.)  For something like Tristan et Iseult, which at the time we read it was a stretch, I read ahead and made lists of unknown words and had my son write a brief definition of the words before doing the reading.  I also picked out tricky grammatical bits and we discussed them.  He summarized every paragraph (in English, just a sentence or two).  We discussed the book a la TWTM.  So - boiled down, he had to look up some of the unknown words, think about HOW the book said what it said, understand well enough to summarize it, and talk about it in French.  Very, very powerful stuff, considering that it didn't take that much time.  My son also read lots of other books without doing all that, and when he was smaller, we had books in French that I read aloud, just like we had books in English.

 

I liked the Hachette history/geography very much.  It followed the four year WTM cycle.  The history consisted almost entirely of primary sources - photos, art, passages from diaries or news accounts or contemporary histories.  This is where my son learned to analyze primary sources and write about them (a necessary academic skill).  He says it is where he learned to write essays.  He says that it was better to study history from the European point of view, since he absorbed enough of the US point of view just by living here.  He says the geography was useful.  I liked that geography was included.  He says he is still running across bits of artwork or writing that he remembers from the history part.  The books were divided into daily lessons and you are meant to finish the whole book, unlike US textbooks, which put in absolutely everything they think any teacher might ever want to teach and then leave the teacher to pick which bits to use and which to skip.  The drawback is that it is European history, not world history.  You will want to suppliment if you want your child to study what happened in other continents or Asia.

 

HTH

Nan

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Well...  I could definately have done it better.  Very very definately.  What happened was that my sons forgot even the simplest things I taught them in French and I retaught over and over again and we didn't getting anywhere and I finally got so tired of the reteaching that I decided to do something really really drastic - I decided I was only going to speak French to them.  It was the end of the school year, so we didn't have to worry about school.  This turned out to be an excersize in how little one can get away with saying to one's children because although I could read French at about the Agatha Christie level, I didn't even know how to tell them to get in the car or brush their teeth.  It took a ton of work on my part and it failed with the older one, who didn't need to be told to brush his teeth but needed to be told things that were way beyond my high school French.  Youngest and I struggled on for about awhile with me reading lots of books aloud to him, letting him watch way more videos than usual, and not really saying much to him.  We joined the French library and a bilingual email list.  At that point, I SHOULD have signed him up for the Alliance Français classes.  It was expensive and conflicted with gymnastics and was far away, so I didn't.  Instead, we struggled along with me trying to teach him some grammar and him passively resisting and me alternating between despair at his non-existant writing and grammar abilities and wonder at how much high speed French he understood.  In middle school, I hired a tutor whom we saw once a week for a year and a half.  Then we didn't do anything for a few years other than be tourists in a few French-speaking places and occasionally read a book.  Then we hit high school and Joan made her suggestions.  Cleo in Quebec and Ester Maria also helped a whole bunch.  The grammar situation continued to plague us, since he retained very little from the grammar program we worked through.  It did help some.  Then he grew a bit older and spent some time in Switzerland with a group of English and French speakers and decided that knowing French was rather handy.  We sat down and talked about how he was going to learn to speak and write better.  TWTM board came to the rescue once again and we set up a fantastic summer immersion.  This, incidentally, helped a lot for preparation for college, since it included the summer French program at the University of Lausanne.  His French speaking and writing still aren't great, but he speaks, reads, and understands SO much better than I did when I graduated from high school, and his writing is almost as good as mine was.  Personally, I would gladly have traded my ability to write for ability in the other three areas.  Anyhow, that is NOT how you want to do it lol, so it probably isn't very helpful.  It would have been much better to combine Alliance classes with the rest of the stuff we did.

 

Nan

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I started two languages with my kids right from the start (German and Spanish, picked just because I'm fluent in them).  At the beginning it was mostly songs (I sung, plus lots and lots of CDs in the car), and I read them some simple books sometime at night time.

 

German:

At about 3, I found a German playgroup that was mostly for expatriates, so lots of native speaking kids, and there were games and songs led by a native speaker.  We went there biweekly for a couple of years.

At 5, I enrolled them in the German Saturday School.

I took them to Germany for 5 weeks when the oldest two were 8.

 

Spanish:

When the older two were around 5 or 6 (can't remember) they had a weekly Spanish tutor with a small group of friends.  I wanted speaking immersion - although I can speak it, they didn't like it.  I also wanted them to have other kids learning with them - I feel that's really important, as kids have a hard time understanding why to speak a language if they don't know anyone else speaking or learning it.

 

After about 3 years, we quit the tutor, as she kept teaching them the same stuff (can we move on from colors, body parts, and months now, please?).  Then I started them and another friend that had been with the tutor on lessons myself using a more traditional textbook approach, and continued that till high school.

 

Older two are now in high school.  They'll take the German AP this year (and the German DSD1) and the Spanish AP next year, so I figure I got them to a good place.

 

Younger dd, however, really didn't like Spanish (and just tolerates German), and I never found a stable group to teach her with like I did with the olders, so I let her drop Spanish this year.  I figured better one language to mastery than two halfway.  Now she says she'd like to learn modern Greek or Russian - basically something mom can't speak or read.  We'll see if anything comes of that...  I told her she had to stick with German all the way, though.

 

When they were little, the rule was cartoon/kid programming only in Spanish or German.  That worked till a few years ago... it's harder as they get older!

 

 

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When they were little, the rule was cartoon/kid programming only in Spanish or German.  That worked till a few years ago... it's harder as they get older!

 

We have no cable so I'll have to investigate this. I may get a bunch of French CDs when we are there this summer and get a universal DVD player.

 

The "harder as they get older" comment is why I want to start the second language (on a slower track) now.

 

I think it's amazing you taught them yourself past intermediate level. I plan to hire a tutor and keep tabs (and asking for daily homework, etc).

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Jr is being raised bilingual now in ASL and English. Not baby signing we are trying to teach him ASL as a means of communication, it is super important to Hubby that Jr. be able to speak with his many Deaf relatives (grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins). Hubby and I are learning Spanish together and hope to get him exposed to Spanish also. When he is signing well we will be getting a part time Spanish nanny. We hope that by 4 he'll be conversant in Spanish, ASL and English.

 

How quickly and how strongly his Eng, ASL and Spn develop will determine when we add in languages 4 and 5. Hubby would like him to graduate high-school with intermediate to conversant abilities in 5 languages. :huh:  I'll be happy with 3-4.

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We have no cable so I'll have to investigate this. I may get a bunch of French CDs when we are there this summer and get a universal DVD player.

 

Yes, a universal DVD player was one of the best homeschooling investments I've made!  We also don't have cable.

 

 

The "harder as they get older" comment is why I want to start the second language (on a slower track) now.

 

This is wise.

 

I think it's amazing you taught them yourself past intermediate level. I plan to hire a tutor and keep tabs (and asking for daily homework, etc).

 

 

LOL... well, it worked for two of them; and I only really taught them Spanish... they're still at the German Sat. School for German - couldn't imagine teaching all of two foreign languages to mastery.  Youngest dropped the one I was teaching!

 

One of my older ones is now expanding her interest in languages, which is very nice to see.  She's been self-teaching Icelandic, and now Japanese.  She'd also like to learn Dutch.  We'll see how that all goes!

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