Piney Woods Homeschool

This summer I sat down and read the first few chapters of Barry Farber's book "How to Learn Any Language" . I made notes on his suggestions for how to begin with a foreign language (because although we've been working with Spanish for several years, I still consider dd to be a beginner). The part with suggestions begins in Part II, "Gathering Your Tools", although the previous chapters help you to understand what you are trying to accomplish and why you are using these methods. After I made my notes, I pulled out my bin of Spanish resources and chose what would best fit my needs. I scheduled out a term's worth of work, written work from a textbook and audio work with Pimsleur. I have a whole collection of Spanish textbooks, some of which we've dabbled in before, but based on Farber's explanation of our goals I chose one I picked up at a homeschool booksale on a whim, " Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish " by Margarita Madrigal. ...

This year I wanted to move forward with Spanish more aggressively, and I wanted a program with a strong audio component.  In fact, since I already had a couple of books with which I was very happy, I really wanted a strictly audio program.  The first one we tried was Pimsleur ; after listening to the free sample lesson I bought the eight-lesson mini-package so we could try it out.  My third grader has been using this set for about five weeks now, on her own.  She does ten minutes of a lesson three nights a week, listening to the CD and speaking when prompted.  The lessons move slowly with lots of repetition and using few verb forms.  The speakers pronounce the words clearly and new words are pronounced one syllable at a time, starting from the final syllable and moving backwards through the word.  I would very much like to have access to a transcript of the lessons so that I could know what words and phrases have been covered without liste...

Help Your Child With a Foreign Language (Berlitz Kids) by Opal Dunn provides a simple guide for teaching a child the beginnings of any foreign language. She outlines the process, but also gives a great deal of explanation of how children learn foreign language as well as many examples of how to proceed. Certainly this small volume embodies Charlotte Mason’s advice from Volume 1, p.300: "French should be acquired as English is, not as a grammar, but as a living speech." My familiarity with Gouin is limited to CM’s description in that same section of Volume 1. I would say based on that description that Dunn’s work applies some of Gouin’s principles: ". . . we must acquire a new language as a child acquires his mother tongue . . ."  (And CM follows this remark with an observation that Gouin’s application of this principle may or may not be the best way to apply it.) ". . . the ear, and not the eye, is the physical organ for apprehending a languag...