Spanish

A friend of mine let me borrow Rosetta Stone, Spanish 1 for Arielle to use. We tried it last year and kept getting sidetracked. I know from my experience with learning a foreign language, you have to be consistent. That's why Chinese school for the girls years ago did not work. You can't learn another language by attending a class an hour and half once a week. I told Arielle I wanted to learn Spanish with her. So finally we got serious about it.

Rosetta Stone is fun! And I am convinced it is the best way to learn, apart from actually living in another country among native speakers, of course. The program has so many ways of interacting with the language that you can't not learn it. Our study really took off when Arielle and I began competing! We have a notebook with each exercise and our scores in time and percent correct. (Also, this will provide documentation for the portfolio next year.) Right now Arielle is beating me by a small margin, and she is loving that. I should have an advantage, considering I learned a lot of Spanish during my time in Spain. But that was many years ago.

Liana wants to learn Chinese and not Spanish. We don't have Rosetta Stone for her yet, and I don't think she is quite ready for it. I do think either Chinese or Spanish is the language to learn though. To spite my mother who pushed Spanish on me when I was in middle school, I decided to take French. I continued with French all through high school and college, and a lot of good that did me. It would have been much more useful to know Spanish.

Arielle has a natural talent for language. She is so quick to learn and has quite an ear for it. We haven't done much with the speaking portion of the program, but that will be coming soon.