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How did CM students learn foreign languages by doing them only 3 times per week?
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I have a question that is driving me crazy. I cannot figure out how CM students learned languages like Latin or French by doing them only a couple of times per week. We tried doing Latin last year just twice per week and it did not work at all. This next year I plan on doing it 4-5x/week. We are using Getting Started With Latin, which I love, but my dd would forget what she learned in the previous lessons, last year, so often that it just was not working.
In the SCM Living and Learning notebook it shows that Class II (grades 4-6) did French on Mondays, Wednesdays, a French song/history on Thursdays,and then French again on Saturdays (which we do not do in our hs,obviously). I cannot see how you could learn French this way. What am I missing here?
TIA!
That would be four lessons a week. I don’t see why that would be a problem for learning a new language? It’s three days of work/study and one day of songs/listening.
We do our foreign language lessons daily but they aren’t long and we do mix up things … two days are text book work – writing, reading, answering things and then another day is songs and listening to audio books and then two days are spent doing online programs. The kids are totally in charge of their own learning in this subject. I don’t speak either Spanish or French although I do understand them both at a very basic level. I’m mostly a supporter and a finder of needed materials and tutors and such.
We do our Latin pretty lazily around here since we do it together and it’s everyone’s second or third language study. That book is what we are using plus the Oxford course if we ever get serious about it! 🙂 Getting Started with Latin is ridiculously easy in my mind. Maybe it gets more complicated later. I only open the book to my sticky note at this point!
I can only guess that the children were actually speaking the language more often than that. My son who is LIVING in Romania, completely immersed, still spends an hour + a day studying the language, and that includes 9 weeks of intensive language study (literally almost all day long) in one of the best language study schools in the world. We have never really seriously attempted any kind of language study for less than 30 minutes per day, since the children were little bitty and I was happy if they could count in Spanish and ask basic questions. 🙂 Every language I’ve learned has taken serious study. I really don’t consider 15 minutes 3x a week to be even enough to MAINTAIN language skills.
Look at your goals for language study.
Are you expecting them to be fluent speakers at the end or simple conversationalists who aren’t offensive when they vacation in Europe? Where are they going with these skills? Are they going to use them … ever? Are the goals entrance in to college or living overseas immersed in the language? That all makes a difference.
IMO you can’t really learn to speak fluently without immersion. For most students that is not going to happen. If it is going to happen then chances are that student is already on the right path of serious and intense language study as bookworm describes. Because they want it and need it.
You can study all day long and if your child is not interested in learning a language nothing is going to happen. I tend to go a little unschooler in this area. You can’t beat a dead horse. Charlotte lived in an entirely different time. And she lived in Europe. Everyone in Europe speaks several languages. Think of it this way … if every state in the United States spoke a different language then we’d all know several too. It would be natural and normal and easier.
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