High School Foreign Language

Hi, Danielle. I’m not happy with Rosetta Stone as a high school choice either.

Here is what I use:

Latin in the Christian Trivium for Latin

Spanish and French–Breaking The Spanish Barrier or Breaking the French Barrier. I recommend these highly, the only caveat being that I consider it a MUST that there be someone who can converse with the student for the conversation exercises.

The website for these is http://www.tobreak.com/

I have the demo of Tell Me More, and while it does seem somewhat more complete than Rosetta Stone, I still think it a less attractive option than the above book/CD/conversation combination, not to mention you can get all 3 years for the price of Auralog. 🙂 Because IMO you’d still need to find at very least someone to converse, and the conversation exercises in the Barrier books are a very good place to start.

My oldest son, who has spent a fair amount of time studying Spanish, French, Latin, some German, and has recently added Indonesian, says if you have any doubts or questions about foreign language study at the high school level, he thinks the most “bang for the buck” or the best thing to do with limited time is to put the time into Latin–if he had to pick just one, that is the one he would want to focus on.

HTH!

Michelle D

Danielle, does he speak at least some Spanish? If he does, then the affordable book courses I mentioned could be a very good solution. You might need to check, though, as I am not certain whether Breaking the Spanish Barrier uses European Spanish or Latin American Spanish. I have used the French for 2 years but will not likely use the Spanish version unless my sons find someone better to converse with than me–my French is tolerable but my Spanish is, well, half-French. 🙂

Well, two of the things that Rosetta Stone does NOT provide are conversation practice and grammar! You’ll get precious little of either. Rosetta Stone can do well if all you want to do is pick up some vocabulary. But there is no explicit grammar teaching–after more than two years of work, my sons could not even do something so simple as figure out when to use “ser” and when to use “estar”. I found this very, very frustrating! Also they just rarely picked up on verb conjugation–they simply used third person singular for everything. RS “mentions” some of that in passing, but on my kids it just did not stick! And there is no conversation practice at all. There is no way for there to be–it’s a computer program. It talks about its “speaking” components, but all that really means is it gives you something to say, you say it, and you get a weird readout on your pronunciation. Not very helpful if what you really want to do is TALK to a real person. 🙂

Anyway, the other problem was that I had a hard time keeping on top of what vocabulary they were learning–I could try to reinforce with a little conversation if I knew, but since it was just each child and the computer this was very difficult.

I do know of one product line that is designed to help the non-language-speaking spouse help raise young children bilingually. http://www.oneilllanguage.com/greatEight.html

I do have one of these kits and we enjoyed it but after the little one got bigger, I just didn’t seem able to keep it up and transition to older conversation topics. (I do still remember how to say “Put on your bib!” LOL) It also didn’t help that I was the closest thing our household had to a Spanish speaker, and I’m really not very good. When I get stuck for a word it comes out in French. 🙂

I’ve been watching this post and hoping to find a good Spanish language program. It seems that everyone mentions the need for one parent to speak the language for the children to learn. Neither my husband or I speak anything other than English. Any ideas for this situation?

Thanks, Rebecca

Sorry Rebecca the link is broken, just type in http://www.randomhouse.com/livinglanguage and navigate to the Spanish page, sorry about that, I added it wrong. Linda

For those using Tell Me More, how much grammar does it have and how thorough is it? Will using the program count for one full credit of foreign language in high school? I speak Spanish, but I never learned the grammar portion of the language. When my oldest dd took Spanish in PS, they taught grammar throughout the three years she took it.

I do have a question about RS. Which version did not have grammar?  I know version 3 has some grammar, but I’m not sure how much it has. Has anyone used version 3?

Thanks!

A friend gave us a Powerglide foreign language program to try. Does anyone have any thoughts/experience with this one?

Thanks!