Has anyone successfully accomplished both ancient and modern languages for all H.S.?

[Angela in NC]

Trying to come up with a realistic plan and want to know how you all managed. What did you give up in order to accomplish this and was it worth it? Thanks, Angela

[Laura Corin]

At my school I studied French from ages 11 to 18, Latin from 12 to 16 and Spanish from 16 to 18. Languages were just expected.

My current plan for HS is to continue with Mandarin all the way through. I will give the boys the option of dropping Latin at sixteen if they want to. I hope to start French when they are thirteen or fourteen and do it until at least sixteen.

Best wishes

Laura

[Ms. Riding Hood]

But we are doing it, and I never really expected or planned to. This is what happened: Ds wanted to go to a U.S. military academy, and they only accept modern languages. So after four years of Latin, he decided to take Spanish. But he really didn't want to give up Latin. So he kept on doing both. It was just kind of a fluke.

As far as scheduling, he does it on his own and just fits it in. And he's a very busy kid! I think the fact that the Spanish ties in so nicely with Latin helps a lot. Plus, I don't know that his Spanish is so rigorous a course. He's doing it through correspondence at the U of M , and they use Destinos. He watches the videos online, listens to cd's, does a workbook, and sends in tests and voice recordings for grading. I love it! But I think it moves at a nice, slow pace.

So, it can be done--even by those of us who always thought it sounded like a rash undertaking. :) We'll see if he continues next year.

[Begonia]

Funny that you should ask... dd13 (8th grade) and I were discussing this very issue yesterday. She's currently taking Latin I through Scholars Online and doing Spanish I with me (using En Espanol textbook and ancillary online and cd materials).

Anyway, yesterday dd announced that she thinks she'll have to drop Spanish next year. I'm heartbroken because Spanish is part of her cultural background, it's probably easier than Latin in the long run, and I thought she enjoyed it more than Latin. However, I can see why she would be worried about having to study both through high school. A couple of the colleges she's interested in want to see four years of a single language, so taking two years of each won't do.

I have suggested that, instead of dropping Spanish all together, she take two years (hs freshman and sophomore years) to complete Spanish II ("just for fun"). Perhaps it'll be possible to do two languages if one takes the second one at a slower pace. At least, that's what I'm hoping!

[Jane in NC]

Trying to come up with a realistic plan and want to know how you all managed. What did you give up in order to accomplish this and was it worth it? Thanks, Angela

As in Ms. Riding Hood's case, it may be too early to declare success.

My son really enjoys Latin. As a 10th grader, he is doing what I consider to be a Latin III course, essentially wrapping up his grammar work and being introduced to Roman writers in carefully selected passages. Last year we began French using the French in Action curriculum: text, workbook, audio tapes and free videos from the Annenberg Foundation's website. All was well in the beginning with French. One of my homeschooling buddies had spent her teen years in an African country speaking French so my son would go to her house for conversation. But friend felt that the program was moving too quickly for her to recall her French without a great deal of studying. That was when we hired a tutor.

The tutor worked with my son on conversation, which is the missing component of modern foreign language study when no one in the home speaks the second language. I study French along with my son. The grammar makes sense to me, so I can grade his written work in the workbook. We have decided this year to focus on reading and the written aspect. It is simply too hard to master conversational French in a one hour conversation weekly! (And my old ears cannot even hear some of the subtle differences in French vowel sounds!) It is not that spoken French is ignored. We repeat things on the tape, listen to French and have some exchanges. We are simply not emphasizing the conversational aspect.

I know some people who have gotten around this conversation problem in Spanish by having their students volunteer in church programs working with area Latinos. The dialects are all over the place but some form of conversational Spanish emerges.

My son has said that he wants to wrap up French this year which will leave him with four years of Latin and two years of French on his transcript. (We assume; one never knows!) The original plan had been four and four of each, but I think that the additional French may have to go if he is at the community college next year as planned. (They do not offer French unfortunately.)

Stay tuned. All plans are subject to change in this household.

Jane

[Anne/Ankara]

We're facing some of the same issues here with multiple languages-- my kids have been very interested in learning more, but there are only so many hours in the day! We have alternated our Latin and Turkish lessons each day since the kids were in first grade, so now, at ages 13 and 11, they are solid "Advanced Beginners" in each of these (I would say about year 2 at a high school level). But last year they wanted to add French, since we were visiting there, so now they have had one year of high school French. But juggling all of these is getting tough, and I really want those 4 years of one language with high degree of proficiency, so that's the rub...

Incidentally, for anyone interested in linguistics and language study, there is that new North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, which targets high school and middle school students. We did that yesterday at Carnegie Mellon University, and it was great fun! Highly recommended! You can learn more about it from their website, and I definitely encourage anyone to try it next year (no fee, and you can even take it online). They just posted the problem set, so you can evaluate its content.

http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/

[Lady Lorna]

My daughter has studied both Latin and French since 8th grade; she is now a junior. She has a Latin tutor who comes once a week, and she tends to do the entire week's work the day before. This has seemed to work well, since the tutor is pleased with her work and she also does well on the National Latin Exam. Her French tutor comes twice a week, and again the work is usually done the day before. We spend the extra time on French because my daughter's goal is fluency, and she and her tutor spend a portion of every lesson just talking. Sadly, she will probably be dropping French next year to make room for a Russian language requirement she needs to meet.

Interestingly, my daughter has a friend in the local German school who is required to take German, English, French or Spanish, and Latin. I'm not sure how they manage, though they do have a longish school day.

[Nan in Mass]

My 13yo does French and Latin, and has added Arabic this year. I expect he will do Spanish at some point, too. My older one has a smidgen of Japanese and Latin, and will have some French by the time he leaves me. Our tale is a bit strange. I tried to teach the children French in elementary school and got totally frustrated. They didn't learn anything at all, no matter what I did. Finally, I decided to just speak French to them. Bad French is better than no French, right? And my French is truly bad. I could read it at Harry Potter and Agatha Christie level, but I had long ago forgotten how to speak it and I never had been able to understand it spoken. However, by carrying the dictionary around with me, getting lots of books out of the library and reading them aloud, watching lots of movies, and not saying very much past brush your teeth, I managed to get my youngest speaking and understanding French WAY past my high school French in about 3 months. Since then, we occasionally speak it, and he reads a little every day. The things I had to say to my older son were too complicated, so I abandonned the project with him (he was about 13). Now we are again trying to get him speaking French. I'm speaking it to him (when I can manage to figure out how to say what I need to), he's listening to online radio, he's doing the Pimsleur tapes, and next fall he'll work through the Easy French workbook, so he can write it a little. Then he'll just read it with a dictionary until he gets as good at it as he wants to be. Once they've learned a little bit of the language, reading books in it for 20 minutes a day, looking up any words they don't know, is a great way to continue to learn the language painlessly. Latin we do every day in a school-type way, with a textbook. After my youngest finishes Ecce Romani 3, I'll just have him read Latin every day, along with reading some French every day. That will leave him time to do some Arabic. He's doing the Pimsleur tapes this year, and then next year I'm going to have to find him some proper lessons, with someone else. My oldest learned his bit of Japanese by doing some of Japanese for Young People, some Pimsleur, and then going to Japan for 3 months. I can't tell how much he knows, and neither can he LOL.

That is probably more than you wanted to know about our family's language travels. Latin is giving them an idea of how languages are structured, making it easier to pick up a language. We work hard at that (because we aren't particularly good at languages, believe it or not) and it is going very slowly, but it is going. In the end, my children will be able to read a bit of Latin, and if they keep reading a bit every year, even if it is just an Astrix, they won't lose all that hard work. With modern languages, my goal isn't reading, it is speaking. This makes it easier to double up the languages each year, because one is done with language tapes in the car or informally, just reading something for fun, or through speaking it with someone. Doing two languages in a school-type way, during our school day, would be hard for us. We plan to give my youngest some Spanish by having him take it at CC. By then, he'll just be reading and occasionally speaking his other languages, not formally studying them. I'll give him a credit for French Literature, and another for Latin Literature, one for every 10 books he reads, or something like that. By labelling something "conversational" or "literature", I can sort of halve the work involved. Straight "French" implies the ability to speak, understand, read, and write, but "Conversational French" implies only half that.
-Nan

[mcconnellboys]

No, my older son finished Latin II, but decided against continuing Latin this year when he returned to private school. Instead, he's doing Spanish II this year, and will continue it next year. And that's okay with me,

Regena