How many languages does your AL have?

[Rush]

DS10 is multilingual, but in reality only one of them is a mother-tongue language. The other two are somewhere in the minimum required level (70-80%).                                                                          He is not interested in them, so almost no practising or using them on the top of his programs. I am not worrying or forcing him, just let him be. 

Additionally, he is attending French lessons, we are doing Latin at home and he was planning to begin German as from this October.                                                                                                          So there already are plenty to achieve and accomplish with all of that.  Ok. It will be hard for him, but still doable. He has a very good memory and loves learning.  Anyway, we though it's fine, but definitely more than enough, but DS doesn't want to stop yet and wants to take Chinese too. I tried to enrol him a few years ago, but sadly there was a clash with his tennis academy and he couldn't attend those lessons in the end. Then he forgot for a while and now he is begging me again to begin Chinese and postpone German for a year?                                                                                     

German is a must since he is considering German speaking Swiss Polytechnic Institute for his future studies. No way to drop French too. He simply adores it and dreams to sing in French.  Latin might be a requirement for his carrier, although he doesn't like it much and ready to swap it for Chinese.

My head is spinning. He has already way too much things to do. The only thing I can see it's to drop his school, but unfortunately it's not an option since the homeschooling is prohibited in our country. Crazy, I know, but we have to accept it and live with that ?

Hope your give me a good advice or a right kick to wake up as I am lost and do not know what to do ?

Edited September 4, 2018 by Rush

[8filltheheart]

Unless he is planning on joining a Latin-order priesthood, it is hard to fathom a career where Latin fluency is a requirement.  ?

Honestly, at some pt you just have to put a brake to their enthusiasm.  My college sophomore loved French.  She started trying to teach herself in 3rd grade.  (I, being the very laid back parent that I am and not knowing any French, only mildly indulged her and got her a few resources to work through on her own. (I might have some of these confused by a yr or 2, but it was a lot of languages taking a lot of time.) By the time she was in 6th grade, she convinced me she was serious about learning languages, so we started seriously with Latin.  By 7th she was at a high school level in Latin.

In 7th, she was begging for "real French," so I bought her high school French curriculum, and we sent her to a summer immersion camp.  By 9th grade, she was begging for Russian.  That I outsourced to a tutor.  ?  So in 10th, she was taking Latin 4, French 4, and Russian 2.  She could read Latin and was teaching herself French in all earnestness. She was serious about Russian.  In 10th she wanted to add German.  I told her no.  Her language studies were already consuming a huge portion of her day.  She had to have time for English, science, history, math, and a life!

FWIW, she graduated from high school fluent in French even though she didn't really study it seriously until 7th.  By 12th, she listened to all of her news in French, read French history in French, and read Les Mis in French.  She was not fluent, but she was at  a solid B1 level in Russian.  She ended up having to drop Latin b/c she just didn't have enough hours in the day. 

Now that she hasn't done Latin in yrs, she has lost most of it.  She can go back and reteach herself, but it isn't as if it is there for immediate recall.  She didn't take any Russian speaking class spring semester last yr, and this summer she had to spend some time reviewing things so she would be ready for her class this fall bc she already felt she had started forgetting things.  It does come back, but it does take effort. (We lived in Brazil from the time our oldest was 7-10 and he was 100% fluent.  He only spoke English at home and all of his friends were Brazilian. He would even sleepwalk speaking Portuguese. As an adult, he remembers none.)

So I guess it really boils down to how many hours per day you are willing to have foreign languages take away from other parts of life.  How will the languages be maintained long term? Just dabbling or not maintaining will not lead to long-term fluency.  What is the goal?

[mathnerd]

It depends on what your child would like to focus on for a career. Mine wants a STEM career and he studies 3 languages. I think that it is too much because he needs to hone his focus on computer programming, the sciences (as in work on long term projects) and go more deeper into STEM subjects. So, we will drop 2 languages in the next year or two and focus on STEM subjects.

But, if your child wants to specialize in languages, or work in a field where being a multi-linguist is essential, he needs to keep up with learning all languages that interest him.

[Arcadia]

Two because that’s all I am willing to deal with and my husband doesn’t help with languages. 

Chinese is our heritage language so it’s easier for us to help our kids with. Our kids don’t mind learning because they get 24/7 help.

German is something my kids picked in elementary school when we asked them to  pick something. We offered French, German, Spanish, Italian as those were the languages that were easier to find brick and mortar classes for. 

DS13 likes to dabble in languages. He does that in his free time while on public transport. His down time, his hobby, I do not need to do anything about it. He loves translating. When I was an engineer, I had to translate technical documents from Chinese to English. My husband has to read emails in Chinese sometimes from the China office, google translate is hilarious. China office could translate but that would take time.

[Jackie]

We don’t do as many languages because of limitations on both time and money. If DD had her way, she would probably be doing around four right now. 

As it is, she only has two. She is conversational in Spanish, and keeps up with that but isn’t looking to improve on it right now. Her primary foreign language is currently French. When she manages a conversational levelin that, she wants to try Arabic, which will need fully outsourced. If she manages that one, she wants to add Mandarin, which will also need fully outsourced. Ouch.

Whenever she asks to add something (which is fairly often), we start by looking at the schedule. For everything she adds, something needs given up. That “something” might be free time, but free time is quite valuable, too. If she can’t find a space in the schedule, then she knows to move on. 

She’s still young, though. Who knows what the future holds.

[maize]

Most people whose careers involve lots of Latin based vocabulary (such as doctors) don't spend years studying the language; it's just specialized vocab not grammar etc. Root words would be sufficient.

Likewise for singing in French, which requires primarily pronunciation instruction. Of course a true love of the language is a different matter.

One thing to remember: language learning does not all need to be packed into the first two decades of life. I'm in my forties and still learning new languages.

Edited September 6, 2018 by maize

[Gil]

My children speak and learn in 2 languages (1 natively, 1 fluently) and are now studying a 3rd with the goal of being able to claim the title "tri-lingual" by the time they graduate in 6ish years.

[Rush]

Thank you everyone for your comments and my apology for disappearing:)

I was lucky enough to get a gastric flu and successfully pass it around the family? 

On 9/4/2018 at 9:04 PM, 8FillTheHeart said:

Unless he is planning on joining a Latin-order priesthood, it is hard to fathom a career where Latin fluency is a requirement.  ?

So I guess it really boils down to how many hours per day you are willing to have foreign languages take away from other parts of life.  How will the languages be maintained long term? Just dabbling or not maintaining will not lead to long-term fluency.  What is the goal?

DS is hyper and his free time is our biggest issue. To be honest he has non of it? 

Last year he had a full time school, 18 hrs of sports and 5-6 hrs of other activities + maths club. This year I reduced the sports hours by 3 hrs, as I am worrying that is too much for him, but now he is anyway filling it up with other intellectual activities. 

I agree that at one point we have to intervene and reduced it significantly, but for the time being everything seems so easy for him and it doesn't take so much of his efforts. Besides he is still young (10yo), loves diversity and having fun and we really like the idea to give him some more time to discover the things around. With the languages a bit different, it's a commitment for years. If it is up to DS he would not stop on those he already had and would take another couple of languages more. He loves history and geography, wants to learn everything about the world/countries, their heritage and languages spoken, but in the end he wishes to become a scientist, not a linguist and this is my concern ? 

But after reading all yours comments I have realised that Latin in fact could be omitted. So we have enrolled him in Chinese classes for this scholastic year, and then I guess we will see what to do ? 

Thanks again to all of you. I am so happy that many years ago I came across with this forum.  You make my life easier? and I am not feeling all the time that I am crazy mother who steals the childhood from her kids?

 

Edited September 23, 2018 by Rush

[Condessa]

At one point I had one doing Latin and Greek, the next doing German, and all doing Spanish together as a family.  I was playing with the idea of adding Hebrew.  I love languages (my background is linguistics), but I finally woke up to our need to cut back for my sanity's sake.  Classical girl had to pick one, German girl got a Skype tutor, and I finally accepted that if keeping dh's family heritage language going didn't matter to him, maybe I didn't need to keep struggling trying to teach a language I don't know.

We may add more languages back in later as the kids get older and more independent (and as more funds become available for outsourcing), but for now this is what works for us.

Edited October 4, 2018 by Michelle Conde

[Arcadia]

On 9/23/2018 at 12:12 AM, Rush said:

If it is up to DS he would not stop on those he already had and would take another couple of languages more. He loves history and geography, wants to learn everything about the world/countries, their heritage and languages spoken, but in the end he wishes to become a scientist, not a linguist and this is my concern ? 

 

It is possible to be both scientist and linguist.

DS13 who treats language comparison as a hobby looked at what are the UN official languages and that sparked his interest in Russian as a future hobby in addition to French. He thinks French and Spanish are too similar and since there are more Spanish than French speakers locally, he goes for what is less common. 

”There are six official languages of the UN.  These are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.” http://www.un.org/en/sections/about-un/official-languages/

My DS13 doesn’t sleep well if he is not mentally tired. I have a similar problem of insomnia cause by not being able to mentally turn off and sleep. We are trying for a 9pm bedtime as requested by him. However I am letting him “overload” mentally during the awake hours since it helps him to sleep well. 

As for language acquisition being a long term commitment, only DS12 has a problem with starts and stops so far (for any subject). My husband who is not good at languages is able to pick up German in college, stop until kids started German, and then pick it back up again. He is of course not as fluent in German as he is in Chinese (heritage) but it’s not a start back from zero. Language acquisition is a life long process.

[Rush]

On 10/4/2018 at 7:57 PM, Arcadia said:

 

It is possible to be both scientist and linguist.

DS13 who treats language comparison as a hobby looked at what are the UN official languages and that sparked his interest in Russian as a future hobby in addition to French. He thinks French and Spanish are too similar and since there are more Spanish than French speakers locally, he goes for what is less common. 

”There are six official languages of the UN.  These are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.” http://www.un.org/en/sections/about-un/official-languages/

My DS13 doesn’t sleep well if he is not mentally tired. I have a similar problem of insomnia cause by not being able to mentally turn off and sleep. We are trying for a 9pm bedtime as requested by him. However I am letting him “overload” mentally during the awake hours since it helps him to sleep well. 

As for language acquisition being a long term commitment, only DS12 has a problem with starts and stops so far (for any subject). My husband who is not good at languages is able to pick up German in college, stop until kids started German, and then pick it back up again. He is of course not as fluent in German as he is in Chinese (heritage) but it’s not a start back from zero. Language acquisition is a life long process.

Thank you for your input. I completely agree with you, but he had such enormous amount of the things, so I simply could not figure out our logistical issue.

In the end the course was offered very late in the evening during weekdays and we had to drop this idea and were thinking to take online classes instead, but suddenly DS had to drop his main sport, tennis, and has found another his passion in chess. Now he is thinking that he has too much things to think about, and he is letting this idea go 😅 

Now I have another crazy son who wanted to learn Japanese since 3 and we have already a teacher, so I am still in the same boat😅

 

 

[Rush]

Merry Xmas to everyone and Happy New Year!🎄🎆🍷

Here we come again with our little problem😄

My DS has finally decided that he needs neither Latin nor German, but he definitely wants to learn Chinese and asked me to find an online course/tutor for now, since our local course begins in October.

We've recently tried LingoBus, but DS didn't like it, commenting that this course was probably for preschoolers😩. What I didn't like that the lessons are way too short. DS also wants one single teacher for now, as he is shy and it takes him a few minutes to adapt to a new teacher. 

 I was looking for something else, but without any success and I will really appreciate if someone could help us with any info regarding Chinese lessons. 

Thanks in advance☺️

 

 

 

[Rush]

We've just founded a Chinese tutor in our local uni. 

Thank you everyone for your attention and all the best! 😉