Latin and Spanish together

[mamabear2three]

I have Prima Latina for my daughter for next year (strong verbal skills, currently finishing up 2nd grade writing and math material, reading at 4-5th grade level). I feel like it would add so much to her vocabulary/language skills since this is her strongest area.

 

She is begging to learn Spanish, though, and has picked up some vocabulary already from what little I remember from high school Spanish. 

 

So would it be too much to do Prima Latina and Spanish together next year? 

 

Edited: I'm still trying to find a Spanish program that I like the looks of...

[Ethel Mertz]

We do both Spanish and Latin. Have you looked at CAP's Song School Spanish?

[happypamama]

I don't have experience with Prima Latina, but DD has been doing Spanish for two years and Latin for five. She's currently using DuoLingo for Spanish and will move on to Getting Started With Spanish after that, and we will decide in a year about high school Spanish; for Latin, she has one book left of Latin's Not So Tough, and then I am looking at Latin Alive or Wheelock for high school. All that to say that I think Spanish and Latin work fine together. I maybe wouldn't do both Getting Started With Latin and Getting Started With Spanish at the same time, even though we adore the format of them, because I think having distinctly different formats keeps them separate in her mind, but she's finding that since Spanish derives from Latin, it's helpful. She'll note that something from one sounds like something from the other, and it's a plus for her, not a minus.

 

(I've been studying Latin along with her, plus I studied French and Italian and am brushing up on those two plus learning Spanish through DuoLingo. I substitute the wrong language noun sometimes, but generally, each language has its own distinct flavor and makes logical sense.)

[Miss Tick]

We do Spanish and Latin also. I intentionally draw comparisons between the two. We compare new Latin vocabulary to the Spanish and verb conjugations are similar between the two which I've seen my children capitalize on.

[RootAnn]

Some kids will be able to do both together. I personally recommend starting one of them & then adding the other later, once one is at least somewhat established. 

 

- If she really wants to learn Spanish, I'd go with that first.

- The only problem there is not the lack of early Spanish programs/material, but that many are not of great quality or you can't find "the next level" to go to. As someone who had some Spanish in your past, hopefully you will be able to overcome the hurdles us never-had-Spanish types have had to go over.

 

- Latin has lots of options for learning at all different levels of introduction. You'll be able to jump into it later, just going faster both because she'll be older & because she'll already have figured out the "how to learn a foreign language" trick which most of us encounter for our first foreign language.

 

I have one who does both Latin & Spanish and two others who are only doing Latin right now. The Latin-only kids want to add French, not Spanish, when the time comes. I don't mind doing multiple foreign languages, but at some point, it becomes difficult, time-wise, to do both at a high level of rigor without making allowances somewhere else. My kids are not super star students - we are only 'average' learners. We do the Prima/LC/Forms route for Latin. We started with Getting Started with Spanish for Spanish in about 4th grade.