reasonable expectations in foreign language learning

[EmilyGF]

Hi all,

I am working on my girls' German literature curriculum for the coming year. They do literature one day a week to support the learning they are doing from a text book during the rest of the week. My hope with the literature is to make it easier for them to approach real German without fear and to expose them to the way real German is written.

I'm trying to decide what a reasonable amount of vocabulary to learn per week is. For the literature books, I make the Anki cards that they incorporate into their decks.

My girls are 11 and 13. How many words per week would you expect students of those ages to master? I may also have set of cards that only my older one gets, if the vocab is too tricky. The literature vocab is in addition to their general book vocabulary. They also learn Spanish, so they have daily Spanish work, too.

Emily

[Miss Tick]

I think I would shoot for an average of 10 to 20 new cards a week. I would set the limit on "new cards" in Anki to 10 or 15 so nobody gets overwhelmed on Mondays. 😊

In Latin, my DD gets about 20 new words every 2-3 weeks, so about 40 new Anki cards. Now, she doesn't practice them every day, so hardly has them "mastered" by the time the next group comes along. For Spanish we just read and talk and I don't do any kind of flashcard, this is our approach to learning it more like you learn your native language. For German, which is her preferred language, the vocabulary comes irregularly in big blobs I just put the words in when I get inspired (we are both learning from nothing), BUT I set Anki to only give 20 new cards a day, so it spreads out the new cards over time.

[EmilyGF]

Wow, that's good to know! I've been expecting about double that from each of the two languages. Maybe that has been why dd11 is a bit overwhelmed!