DE Spanish advice

[skimomma]

Dd (9th grade) is taking AP Latin with Lukeion this year.  I mention this because she has a strong background in foreign language and grammar.  Next year, she would like to take Spanish, specifically because she plans to travel where it may be needed directly after graduation.  I do not speak Spanish (or any other foreign languages) nor does my dh or anyone we know well.  We are looking into DE at our local university.  I worry that coming in cold will be a problem as I suspect many of the college students in the class will have taken Spanish in high school.  But I also don't want to "double dip" on her transcript by taking a year (or two) of high school Spanish from an online provider then Spanish 1 at the university as a DE student.  Is it completely insane to consider putting her in DE without any background?  Anyone done this? How did it go?

[eagleynne]

100 level Spanish (or any language) classes are for students with little to no background in the language. There is no reason she couldn't do DE from the beginning. Just make sure the course name or description says something like "Elementary Spanish" or "Beginning Spanish"

[skimomma]

100 level Spanish (or any language) classes are for students with little to no background in the language. There is no reason she couldn't do DE from the beginning. Just make sure the course name or description says something like "Elementary Spanish" or "Beginning Spanish"

 

That is good to know.  Having not taken any foreign language in college myself, I worried that it was more like college-level chemistry or physics (for engineers in my case) which would have been very difficult with no previous exposure from high school chemistry or physics.  That said, most everyone I knew who did take foreign language 101 in college had taken at least two years of the same language in high school.  Those who had taken 3-4 years in high school might start with second or third year in college.  This is what lead me to believe it might be a bad idea for a DE student to go in cold.

[RootAnn]

DD#1 has background in Latin, though not the same extent as your DD. She found that at the beginning it gave her a leg up on the other students, but she also found that being as closely related as they were, she would sometimes use the wrong endings, spell something in the other language accidentally, or not be able to think of the correct word because all she could think of was the other language's same word translation.

 

She ended up picking Spanish over Latin, moved faster in Spanish, and dropped her Latin progress eventually. I know there are other kids who are able to keep them straight, but she chose not to put the extra effort in as she just loved Spanish so much more.

 

Just let her be aware that even though they start at the beginning, DE generally moves twice as fast as a high school class!

 

If she wants to dip her toes in without making a full time commitment to Spanish before DE, I recommend Getting Started With Spanish. Adding 5-15 minutes of Duolingo a day once you are about 1/3 of the way through the book is also helpful. She could easily do both of these in 30 minutes or less a day.

[mom2att]

My oldest took a very similar path to what you are considering. She had 2 years of Latin at our state's virtual school but really wanted to move to Spanish. My sister teaches Spanish at the virtual school, so we enrolled her in Spanish 1 there. The next obvious step was DE Spanish, and the college actually recommended that she start at Spanish 1. She did so (and was glad she did--it moved a lot faster, and the students with no Spanish background struggled), and continued with Spanish 2 there. After that she moved to the university, continuing with Spanish as she had chosen to minor in it.

 

Since colleges seem to favor DE classes from homeschoolers, on her transcript those were the Spanish options I listed--not the virtual school class.

[G5052]

My oldest did AP Latin with Lukeion, and then two semesters of DE Spanish. He said that it was easy in comparison. He struggled at first with the differences and more emphasis on the spoken language, but it went very well.

 

DD did through Latin 4 with another provider, and she's in college this fall at the same school and has the same professor. She's a liberal arts major, so this is one of four semesters.

 

The reality is that after Latin, they have much more grammar than the vast majority of students who took Spanish in high school, and that's usually were students trip up with college-level language study. A lot of high schools don't emphasize the grammar. The local high school here actually has Latin, and they have the same approach. I used to go to a Pilates class with one of the teachers, and she once told me that there was no way that she'd ever give her students the National Latin Exam. They didn't know enough grammar.

Edited August 25, 2017 by G5052