A foreign language thread...
 

Let's talk about teaching foreign languages. :) What do you do? What do you wish you could do?

We are embarking on a journey to learn German. In the past, I've tried to get DD to learn some Spanish. She's been everywhere from totally resistant to very mildly interested. So, we dropped any attempts to work on a foreign language. It was just draining too much energy. This semester I started talking to her about how she's going to need a foreign language in order to graduate from high school someday. She started casually mentioning wanting to learn German. This week she asked if DuoLingo (a language learning app that we've used for Spanish) has German. We checked, and she immediately started working through the first German lesson!! All week she's been playing around with German learning apps, attempting to use all the German phrases she's learning, and organizing a binder for keeping German vocab!!! :jawdrop

So, anyway, we've found a few things to help us along. DH spoke German fluently in high school/early college. This means we have a little help when we get stuck...but very little because DH has learned Spanish since then, and he has a hard time switching languages. :giggle

We're using the following apps:
DuoLingo
Busuu
MosaLingua

We also found a podcast called Coffee Break German.

And we have free access to an online language learning program through our public library.

With so many free resources available, I'm disinclined to purchase anything. If we want it, our library also has Pimsleur, Mango Passport, and the Living Language Series. Anyone have experience with any of these? We have used Pimsleur Spanish. That's how DH learned Spanish. It's great for auditory learners, but it doesn't work well for me.

We have a Germanic American Institute not far from us, too, that offers classes, cultural events, and conversation circles. (We'll be attending a Swiss Yodeling class in a couple of weeks! :rockon)

Re: A foreign language thread...
 

Live Mocha may have German. I know it has Spanish & Russian but not sure of all their offerings.

Re: A foreign language thread...
 

You are SO inspiring!! I have been wanting the Little's to learn German because, well, they are half German and it will be so useful. DD1 is fluent but isn't really able to teach them. DH used to only speak German to them, but when one of them started having some English speech issues, we stopped that. She's been in speech therapy for a year now and has improved dramatically so I have been talking to dh about speaking it to them again. The only thing is, he's out of town so much that it's hard for him to teach them.

NOW though I am going to do this myself! I am going to upload the apps and use the same resources you listed above. My German is terrible, I understand more than I speak, but it is definitely not great by any means.

Thank you SO SO much!

I will keep up with this thread for inspiration. :)

---------- Post added at 02:51 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:43 PM ----------

We do have a big handful of German movies and stories on DVD. We also have quite a few story books and even school books, although the school books are for older grades than what the Littles are in. I will pull these out and start utilizing them to my advantage.

Honestly, it's hard for me to read and try to speak it because people always laugh when I try. Dh laughs every time, I once thanked my in-laws for the 'naked eating' instead of dinner, and some of the sounds are hard for me to get. BUT, since it's for my kids, I'm going to make a much stronger attempt :)

Re: A foreign language thread...
 

I have looked at Rosetta Stone and Duolingo. I think they are great for review, but what I would really like to see are programs like the old French in Action. A clear written approach with lots of practice and an auditory approach. We are thinking of doing German here too.

Re: A foreign language thread...
 

The girls have used Rosetta Stone - DD1 Spanish, Dd2 French.

Ds really needs to learn some Spanish - I really hate the 'society will expect it of you' but .... it will... I was asked if he spoke Spanish when he came home and had to respond 'as well as any 8 month old I suppose' :scratch Ds on the other hand wants to learn anything but Spanish. German....even Gaelic are high on his list.

What is good for kids about 9?

Re: A foreign language thread...
 

I took 12 years of Spanish (mexicano) in public school, got to the point where I was translating poetry and acting as the unofficial TA--and then lost the language over the next mumblety years due to not having any Spanish-speaking friends or access to the kinds of books or music I like in Spanish. So I've been re-acquiring, and updating, my own Spanish while teaching my girls. The following, then, is from the perspective of somebody who has two students on either side of age nine, but also a tiny bit of fluency to fall back on.

After some false starts, I realized that the way to teach it, for my two at least, was to keep it verbal and keep it relevant. I bought the Flip Flop Spanish Word-a-Day Perpetual Calendar by Sra. Goze, but replaced the words for each day and the picture to color with words relevant to our lives and a visual dictionary built from coloring pages printed off the Web. Here's how we do it (this is basically Goze's method):

1. I do a little review of my own when planning the day's lesson ahead of time. WordReference.com is awesome for this--I get to chat with native mexicano speakers! We learn words based around one or two themes at a time, generally planned by the week.

2. We use a system I encountered in higher-level textbooks, in which the students learn a model dialogue and drop in new vocabulary words as they use them. Currently our model dialogues are (excuse the missing Spanish punctuation):

Q: Cual es la fecha de hoy?
A: Hoy es ---- el ----- de -----.

Q: Que tiempo hace?
A: Answer with weather and astronomy (we like skywatching) terms that use hay, hace, or esta'; comment on last night's weather using hubo or estuvo; currently they can handle sentences as complex as Hubo mucha nieve anoche, pero no hay nieve ahora porque esta' lloviendo esta manana.

Our next model dialogue will be about clean and dirty clothes. (I said relevant. :) )

3. After we say the new word together three times, I model it, and we have about 5 minutes of conversation using existing and new vocabulary.

4. Then Sophia copies the new word from a written model onto a dictionary page and Eva colors or draws the illustration.

5. We end with a review of a set of useful vocabulary words, such as colors, numbers to 20, days of the week, or months of the year.

Re: A foreign language thread...
 

Thank you for starting this thread! I have started my kids on German several times and always given up. Now that we have DSL internet we have so many more options. I'm excited to look at some of the things you posted. :ty (I took German in high school, too, and I used to be fluent enough for travel conversation. I need to brush up.)

Re: A foreign language thread...
 

My biggest problem is that my background is in French, so I'm good with helping dd2.

BUT, dh's boss is Mexican-American and has said he is willing to help us teach ds Spanish, so I need to get some sort of system going.

Thanks for the references!!

Re: A foreign language thread...
 

Oh, I'm so glad to see that others have been inspired! I'm honestly much more excited, myself, about teaching a foreign language than I've been in a long time. (DD's enthusiasm & buy-in make a huge difference!)

We're now 1 week in, and we've dropped the Busuu app. It quickly turned into a LOT of advertising. We were using the free version. I'm not interested in paying for anything just yet.

LiveMocha *does* have German, but they do not have a mobile app. While we are making use of our computer, we are *more* often on mobile devices. LiveMocha is also somewhat similar to the free program our library offers. I'm thinking of using one or the other of these as our core computer-based program, but I haven't decided for sure which one.

Duolingo has been great for a starting point in discussing noun gender and verb conjugation. MosaLingua & the Coffee Break podcast have both been better than Duolingo for getting us speaking words and phrases that are actually useful in real life.

Re: A foreign language thread...
 

Subbing

We're going to do Italian.

Re: A foreign language thread...
 

Oh, I thought I'd add that part of the reason we're inclined to use mobile apps is because our main computer does not currently have a microphone, our mobile devices do have microphones, and most programs have a speaking component.

The program through our library is called Transparent. I can't tell if it's just for our library or if it's a more widely available program.

ETA: The Coffee Break podcast *does* offer other languages: http://radiolingua.com/

Re: A foreign language thread...
 

How's everyone doing?

We recently checked some books out from the library to hep us with verb conjugation & grammar rules (in particular, knowing when to pronounce vowels in certain ways and when nouns are masculine, feminine or neuter).

I am not in love with the library's online program. So, I think we'll try more Live Mocha this week. The library program has an awful lot of flash card type activities, and those get boring and frustrating quickly.

We found a great list of verb cognates this week that has increased our vocabulary exponentially! DD made some flash card to help us remember them, and she's starting to get the rules of conjugation.

We are finding ways to insert our German phrases into daily living. I'd like to increase that now that we're developing some vocabulary.

Re: A foreign language thread...
 

We've "taught" DS1 the local language here by inviting a girl over and teaching her how to play games with him. At first we started with BINGO sheets covered in common pictures for nouns, Guess Who for adjectives and facial features, UNO for colors and numbers and Simon Says for verbs. After he had mastered those we moved on to playing with various toy animals, saying where they were for directions, saying what they were doing, describing them. Now he has a set of cards with pictures of children doing things which they use to prwctice past and future tense sentences and a set of cards with numbers 0-9 on them which can be arranged into almost any number. He LOVES it and it has been so good for him. He would say nothing before, only "I can't speak "language"." Now he has the courage to try!

Hey JoyGal I wonder if your DD could play similar games with your little oens. You just have to make sure she starts slow (no super fast and sneaky Simon Says with every verb she can imagine, just 3-5 verbs over and over until they get them! Then add a couple more and a couple more.).