Foreign Language requirement

[bethben]

Homeschooling has it's weaknesses and learning a foreign language is one of them.  I am of the mindset at this point to give my children 2-3 years of foreign language to just meet a college requirement (should they decide to go to college) and be done with it.  This is not high on my priority list and my dh and I have other goals for their time and our money on outside classes and tutors.  That being said, we don't want to pay for a tutor or enroll them in an online class to fulfill this requirement.  

 

So, what options do we have?  Spanish seems like an option, but what can you use that's easy for a self learner? I can't help AT ALL.  People have weak subjects and teaching a foreign language is definitely mine.  It has to be simple to use and recognized as a college worthy credit.

 

 I am almost thinking of just going through the First-Fourth Form Latin books so we can do something that doesn't require a lot of accurate speaking.  If he went through all four levels, would that be enough for college acceptable language credit?  He did make it through first form latin with some degree of success and made it half way through 2nd form before he hit the wall and I couldn't help him.  

 

Beth

[flyingiguana]

I knew NO Spanish, but that's what my kids wanted to study.  Here's what we did:

 

1. Pimsleur -- all 3 units.  Got them from the library so we didn't have to buy.  If your library doesn't have it, try to get it through interlibrary loan.  I tried a lot of other of these "speak and say" courses and none of them really did much for us

 

2. Destinos -- got through the whole course with my 2nd daughter, only about 2/3 with my older

http://learner.org/series/destinos/

having the book really helps

 

They've both taken the CAPE test for college placement.  They've placed into about the 3rd or 4th semester of college Spanish.

 

My younger one is now trying to up her score so as to place out of Spanish entirely, so she's using this site to learn a whole lot of grammar and vocabulary in a month or two:

https://conjuguemos.com/

motivation for getting out of courses at college is really helping her get through this

 

We experimented with Rosetta Stone and didn't get much out of it.

 

I looked into things like Breaking the Barrier, but it seemed to be a lot of memorization without context.  My kids hated it anyway, so we moved on.  (It could be that books like that would be good for a get 'er done course, but I don't think I'd have been able to learn much beyond memorizing a bunch of words and conjugations.  You could put it on the transcript as a good faith effort for instilling Spanish, but it doesn't teach much.)

 

We tried Destinos first and couldn't follow it.  However, after doing all of Pimsleur, Destinos suddenly started to click.  Watch Destinos with the Spanish subtitles.  The sound quality isn't quite good enough to get everything they're saying.

 

My kids can't really speak Spanish beyond the basics (ordering at a restaurant, asking for simple directions, etc), but they can understand a conversation that isn't too fast if it covers stuff they know the vocabulary for.  My 2nd does seem to have a pretty good accent (anyway, it's way  better than the kids who have had 4-6 years of Spanish at school).  I can't tell how good an accent my 1st daughter has as she refuses to speak the language (but she ended up getting out of her college foreign language with 3 courses of ASL done dual enrollment)

 

Extra bonus: I can now also eavesdrop on people in stores who are speaking Spanish.

[ThisIsTheDay]

One of my kids loves languages, but we also found studying a full language for one year (much less two!) to be too much for our homeschool.  During her senior year, she ended up taking two semesters of Chinese online as a dual enrolled student through our community college.  She found navigating an online class challenging, as there was much less accountability than in the classroom courses.  Two semesters gave her two full high school credits and also transferred to her state uni. She is currently taking her second 200-level course as a freshman in college, and after taking two 300-levels next year, she plans to look into a different language.

 

It worked out so well for her, doing the two semesters as a 12th grader, that I will have my son wait and do the same.

[Sweet Home Alabama]

I asked a similar question several weeks ago.  I'm only repeating here the most popular resources that I read again and again as I researched, and I think this is what we will end up using:

 

Spanish I:  Visual Link Spanish with Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish

 

Spanish II:  Practice Makes Perfect Spanish Verb Tenses,  PMP Spanish Pronouns and Prepositions, and Easy Spanish Reader

 

Both years we will watch age appropriate Spanish TV, and we may check out library books written in Spanish.  You can do a search on Spanish and find threads to read.  Foreign language is a tough one to teach without being fluent.  My oldest outsourced Spanish I and II; her class used Alpha Omega's Spanish.  The class didn't go as well as I would have liked, so I'm seriously considering doing it at home with my other kids.

 

I think the resources above will be the sort that will be self-teaching.  The more I thought about it, if we tried to use a Spanish curriculum, it would assume the instruction of a teacher.  Self-teaching materials, I hope, will take the need for a teacher out and make learning the language mostly independent..... or at least make exposure to the language possible.

 

I know someone who studied Spanish in college who can help us out if we need it.  I would also like to find someone who would converse with my dc in Spanish occasionally.  These things have not been worked out yet.

 

I continue to read all of the threads about Spanish that are posted because to determine how to complete credits for Spanish I and II has not been easy.

[flyingiguana]

These can also be a nice intro:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/

 

They don't go very far, but they are engaging and helpful for beginning students (well, the Spanish one was)