The Linguistics (Language) Teachers Lounge 8-3-2017

[scrapbookbuzz]

Don't be scared by the title - Come on in!

 

Today's theme stems from the fact that in our homeschool today we will begin the curriculum: Learn to Read Greek.

I've looked over a few Greek curricula and this is the one that makes the most sense to me, the teacher, structure-wise.

It's focus is mostly on getting students to the point of being able to comfortably read any classics written in Greek. 

It is a rather hefty curriculum: takes two to three college semesters (at 2 or 3 weeks per chapter) or two to three high school years

(at 4 to 6 weeks per chapter) to finish. Whoo-wee!

 

Are you starting any new-to-you subjects for your kiddos this year? Here: see above.

 

Do you currently speak any language other than English (whether fluently, stumbling along, or working knowledge)? Here: in both Spanish and Russian I'm somewhere between "stumble along" and "working knowledge." I used to be better at both when I used them frequently! I can also communicate somewhat in Italian (very similar to Spanish) and Serbian (very similar to Russian).

 

Who still needs to make copies for school, amongst getting other things ready to start? Here:  :seeya:

 

Talk to me! :bigear:

 

Oh, yes! Remember my antics from yesterday? Well, I got his attention and finally heard from him.  :cool:

[mommyoffive]

Glad your antics worked!  

 

I bet he loved it

 

 

 

I am impressed with all the languages you know.  Awesome.   

[Butter]

New Subjects This Year: Not really.  Fritz will be starting logic, but Cameron's already done in the past using a different curriculum and Ani did it using the same one Fritz will.

 

Other language: Nope.  I'm a typical American.  I tried Spanish and I can understand people when they don't speak too fast (around here they speak very fast!) and I can read it, but I can't speak much, just enough to get by with people who speak enough English to get by.

 

Make copies: I'm printing as I plan.  I've got the first 10 weeks 100% planned and the next 2 week I just have to do the pre-reading.  That brings us through Thanksgiving break.

[scrapbookbuzz]

Butter and mommyoffive, glad to see you this morning! As stated in yesterday's lounge, this is a friend I've known since high school.

There's quite a depth of history there to the point we could never not be friends!

 

As for printing, I need to get at least the Greek worksheets copied. We do not have printer at home - a continuing "argument" with my husband.

Eventually we will have one (again) and it will stay. I know there is other copying/printing I need to get done, just don't know off the top of my head

this morning what it is! In a little bit, I'll actually get dressed and drive to FedEx Office (about a 7 minute drive from here) to make the copies I need.

 

I may make muffins for the Lounge later. Flavors being considered: lemon poppyseed or double chocolate. Any requests?

[Jean in Newcastle]

Hi ya, Scrap!

 

I haven't even started thinking about next school year yet. All the schools around here start in September and we will do the same. Plus, I'm still prepping for camp. I'm basically doing the work of two people and I can't say that I like doing it all myself.

 

I speak Japanese fluently. I learned a smattering of Latin in high school. And I learned koine Greek in seminary. The last two I haven't kept up.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[scrapbookbuzz]

Jean!!! So nice to see you in here! I know about three phrases in Japanese thanks to a Japanese roommate I had in college.

 

If I could wait until September to start, I would. But I'm trying to get my Super Senior graduated by the end of May 2018.

With dyslexia and Aspergers her daily companions, sometimes our schedule doesn't go as planned, so I'd rather start earlier

with space for "hiccups" than start later!

 

This batch of muffins I'm mixing up will be double chocolate. Gluten-free, of course. The next batch may very well be lemon poppyseed!

[JustEm]

This year my oldest is in 3rd grade so it'll be our first year of structured subjects. The only thing new to us will be writing. He is a huge writer and I asked if he'd like to use something to help him get better. He said yes, so we will be trying Treasured Conversations.

 

I can read Spanish pretty well and understand it when spoken slowly. But I have lost the art of speaking it that I had in college. I'd like to get back to speaking it regularly though.

[Selkie]

Hello!

 

Learning Greek sounds like an interesting challenge.  :)

 

I took Spanish in high school and can still speak and understand a little bit. Then I took Swedish in college and enjoyed it very much, but I've forgotten almost all of it now.

 

My boys have each taken a few years of German and my dd is learning Japanese.

 

Two of mine are still finishing up the current school year and should be done in the next week or two. We'll take a month-long break and then start up again in mid-September.

[dirty ethel rackham]

Ooh. Double chocolate muffins? With chips? Gotta have chips.

 

I'm not teaching much this year since dd will have just about all of her classes either at the high school or online. I will be supervising her self learning enough health for a quarter of a credit and we will work through some of the personal finance/consumer ed stuff from the Fed. Other than that, I wearing the counselor hat since it is college application season. It is good that she is more independent than her older siblings, but her "get off my back, I've got this" attitude is causing me some stress and anxiety because I want to know that she has all the bases covered. Oh, and she is now deciding that she wants to look into environmental engineering ... this is my English/art/humanities but hates math kid. Oy.

 

Scrap ... I'm impressed with your language abilities! I used to be about 80% fluent in Spanish ... I minored in it in college. But I don't get to use it very often and have lost way too much vocabulary. The other night, I dreamt that I found myself in another country where no one spoke English and I was separated from my traveling companions. I tried to talk to the locals and was shocked to find myself speaking fluent Spanish. Every time I needed a word or a phrase, it was right there. But, the locals all spoke Italian. I have since had a few dreams in Spanish. But if I had to speak to someone for real, I'm sure I would be struggling.

 

No copies to be made ... at least not for school. I do have a bunch of forms to fill out and send in ... some for the car accident dd and I were in back in October and some forms to add dd as a beneficiary <gasp > something we forgot to do when she was born.

(I do love that i have a 3-in-one printer/copier/scanner. It has made my life so much easier over the years. If i had a big job, i would take it to FedEx.)

 

We just need to get dd registered for an online math class at the college. And I have to pay the bill for her high school registration ...over $350 for public school!

 

Sent from my SM-G900T using Tapatalk

[scrapbookbuzz]

Ellen, isn't it amazing how much a "free public education" costs?

[egao_gakari]

My kiddos "came home" from a Chinese immersion school last year. They're worried about losing their Chinese, and it's really not my language, so I'm thinking this year I'll shell out for 6 months of this flashcard course from remembr.it to drill them in their hanzi, then go back to checking Chinese books out of the university library. (Tried that last year but found that their hanzi knowledge was too scanty to actually read anything. They can speak it, and understand it if it's written in pinyin, but pinyin's not very useful in real life.)

 

I speak fluent Japanese. Contemplating learning Chinese so I can help the kids practice, but my side hustle of teaching Japanese is rapidly becoming our daily bread, so I'm not sure where to find the time!

 

We're also going to try again with Latin this year. It dropped from the curriculum last year due to poor time management on my part.

[wintermom]

I went through the "Ny i Norge" (New in Norway) text book with my ds 11 last year. It was a lot of fun. I speak Norwegian, and the textbook is for new immigrants in Norway. The only problem is keeping up the language when there is no one else to speak it with. There are a few Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic TV series on Netflix that I've been watching to brush up on languages. Icelandic is definitely the most different of the bunch. It would be even more fun to travel to Norway, though. ;)

 

[scrapbookbuzz]

Wintermom, if you haven't already, you really should look into Kris Tualla's historical romance books!

All her characters are Norwegian or of Norwegian decent. I actually know Kris. I am not one who typically

reads any romance novels but I like hers because they're "meaty" in that there is actually a good plot!

Plus in 2 or 3, some Norwegian is actually spoken. What I remember so far is "Takk du!" (thank you).

[FaithManor]

I speak French kind of halfways. I read and understand a lot more than I can speak. I am very slow at forming sentence structure, but give me a magazine in French and I am A OKAY. I think it is because until my sister was an adult - and she is 14 years younger than I, and we've always lived longed distances apart throughout our adult lives - I have not had anyone to practice conversation with so brain is SLOW. And my accent is atrocious!

 

My youngest is working on his third credit of French right now, and he's better at it than I am and he has a lisp that was never 100% taken care of with speech therapy! But his reading is slower, so if you put the two of us together in one body, you'd get one person who was semi decent at speaking, reading, and writing French. Meanwhile, my sister is one fluent woman, living in France, getting her PH.D. in translation, and arguing with non native English speaking professors about their conceited attitudes, there really is a difference between American English and British English. Sometimes she ends up using British English in her papers just for the grade and then they tell her "good job" on her American English!  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:

 

New subjects - dh and I are teaching a history of space tech class as well as an introduction to the world of engineering class, and our own ds the rising senior is in both of them. Plus he has chem for the first time this year. He's had two years of physics, and just in case he goes into aerospace engineering he will have college chem so I thought we better cover the basics. Rocket fuel and all......of course DH, the one that likes to play with flames, seems to think that instead of this entailing titrations it should rather be making rocket fuel, and homemade fireworks. Hoping we survive the chaos. Bad enough that I have my own bad habit of occasionally playing with a tiny bit of pure sodium and watching the flames dart around my reactor bowl!

 

Meanwhile, the eldest boy is just turning into a little clone of his German professor - teacher's pet there. He is now the head German tutor and TA. Middle boy is still finding time in college to self teach Danish, and with online resources is getting quite good. So he now speaks decently - Icelandic and Danish, and reads and writes in ancient Norse runes which makes his anthropology professors positively nuts because he is still majoring in Freshwater Sciences and only minoring in anthropology, and they want him majoring in anthro and minoring in archaeology.

 

Dd is pretty fluent in sign language now. She picked it up during her medic years because it was such a great skill to have, and she retains a bit of her high school Spanish as well. Both languages served her quite well when she was still on the road. Dh is the loan man out. I think he can maybe count to ten and say, hi, goodbye, and possibly three or four other words in Spanish. Poor, poor dh.

 

I have copies to make for the engineering class.

[dirty ethel rackham]

Wow. I'm impressed with the variety of languages here!

I went through the "Ny i Norge" (New in Norway) text book with my ds 11 last year. It was a lot of fun. I speak Norwegian, and the textbook is for new immigrants in Norway. The only problem is keeping up the language when there is no one else to speak it with. There are a few Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic TV series on Netflix that I've been watching to brush up on languages. Icelandic is definitely the most different of the bunch. It would be even more fun to travel to Norway, though. ;)

Oh, where do I find this. K wanted to learn Norwegian and was considering going to St. Olaf. My great grandpa emigrated from Norway in the early 1900s. We think he was originally from Folstad. We have a bunch of genealogical documents in Norwegian that I would love to learn to read some day.

 

I just looked him up and found some census data on him.. maybe I've found a new hobby.

 

Sent from my SM-G900T using Tapatalk

[wintermom]

Wow. I'm impressed with the variety of languages here!Oh, where do I find this. K wanted to learn Norwegian and was considering going to St. Olaf. My great grandpa emigrated from Norway in the early 1900s. We think he was originally from Folstad. We have a bunch of genealogical documents in Norwegian that I would love to learn to read some day.

 

 

 

My sister was an exchange student in Norway, and got the book there when she took the course with other immigrants. You can find on-line resources to learn Norwegian. It's not a difficult language as far as grammar goes, and much of the vocabulary is pretty straight forward. 

 

Vil du ha en kopp kaffe = Will you have a cup of coffee.

 

Takk skal du ha  =  Thanks shall you have  =  Thank you

[Moonhawk]

Oh gosh, new to me subjects. Chemistry I know I took in high school but there is very little past H2O, lol. Thankfully I'm a quick study and it will come back quickly, at least for this level. They want to do extra units on cooking, coding, and a few others that I have some knowledge in, but I am scrambling to pull something together or find a resource for.

 

I had 2 years of Latin in college, loved it but retention is low. I think I had spanish every year kinder-high school junior and can stumble my way through a conversation but am uncomfortable doing so and haven't used it in years. My mom is Mexican and it is her first language, I feel a sense of loss that it's a "lost" part of my heritage. I should try again, but...well, there are a lot of things I want to try. Though after reading all the languages here, I really should.

 

 

[Loesje22000]

Just visiting because of the language part :)

Dd is preparing her oral exam french in september. (I still can't speak French :o )

I hope dd will be ready for the written exam somewhere in 2018, German in 2019, and Latin in 2020.

Somwhere on the road she also has to pass Dutch & English.

Most of these languages are not 'new to me' although I speak most of them very little (except Dutch = mothertongue)

 

Most 'new to me subject' is Math.

So that gives me the most worries.

I have had math at highschool, but somehow this is 'different math' compared to my youth

School start in september here, no copies to make, but I still have to figure out how a graphic calculator works, and why that thing is considered useful...