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Spanish for a 12-year-old?

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alegnab
Newbie
United States
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4 posts - 8 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish, French

 
 Message 1 of 14
19 May 2011 at 4:31pm | IP Logged 
I have a daughter who will soon be 12 years old. She's mainly a visual learner. She's very weak with auditory learning, unless it's combined with visual (so something like Pimsleur would probably not work well for her). She's also an artsy type and has never cared for academics. She was slow with learning to read (compared to my other children), but she now reads well and is a very good speller -- much better than her older brothers were at her age, even though they had been voracious readers for six years by then.

I homeschool my children. Rosetta Stone is very popular among homeschoolers (probably due to good marketing by RS), but I don't want to pay so much money for something that I don't think is very good. We used the free library version for a while, and we didn't have any written material to go along with it. Perhaps I would have liked it better if we had had some of the materials that go along with it. Still, I see that many people here don't like RS. Tell Me More will be at my state's homeschool convention next month. That is also expensive, but it's cheaper than RS.

So, do you have any recommendations for what to use with a 12-year-old visual learner? By the way, I also have a son who's almost 10 years old, and it would be good if he could learn Spanish along with his sister.
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JimC
Senior Member
United Kingdom
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199 posts - 317 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 2 of 14
19 May 2011 at 5:29pm | IP Logged 
Try this program
www.synergyspanish.com

It works on the principle that you can take a small number of words and combine them in lots of different ways so that you can say lots of things. I am using this to teach my 8 year old grandson.

It is an audio course (with written notes) however, I have made word cards for my grandson so that he can physically move the words around to make new sentences. I think this would help the visual learner. It has been very good for him.

Jim

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Cainntear
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Scotland
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Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
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 Message 3 of 14
19 May 2011 at 8:36pm | IP Logged 
Most people who tell me they're "visual learners" never learn to speak a foreign language because they focus too heavily on writing.

I don't really believe in "visual learners" (or any other such type), but if they do exist, I can't see how someone who took to writing late could be considered visual...

I would personally recommend Michel Thomas, even though it has no written component whatsoever.

After doing MT, you can follow up with something like Assimil (a course based on dialogues on CD with written transcripts and translations into English), or a cheap drill book such as the Practice Makes Perfect series.
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Arekkusu
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Canada
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 Message 4 of 14
19 May 2011 at 9:17pm | IP Logged 
Cainntear wrote:
Most people who tell me they're "visual learners" never learn to speak a foreign language because they focus too heavily on writing.

I don't really believe in "visual learners" (or any other such type), but if they do exist, I can't see how someone who took to writing late could be considered visual...

Indeed.

The other option would be for you to go through the course and to teach her yourself.
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iguanamon
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Senior Member
Virgin Islands
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 Message 5 of 14
19 May 2011 at 9:24pm | IP Logged 
I would recommend an old book by Charles Berlitz: "Spanish Step By Step"- about $5.00 on e-bay- with guided instruction. It has no audio and is somewhat dated now but it is the book that got me learning Spanish back in the pre-internet days. The book's gimmick is a "middle language" of how to pronounce Spanish using English sounds- ¿KOHmo ehsTAHS?. Yeah, fellow members, it ain't the best but it can help someone see how a word is stressed and sort of pronounced. Thank God mp3's eliminated the need for such inventions. Still, this might help someone who needs the "visual" component. You could always try to get a native to record some dialog for you, maybe with Rhinospike or use the book in tandem with an audio course.

Your daughter is almost 12, she doesn't have to sound like a native now. She can work on better pronunciation later. That's what I did.

With that book and shortwave radio to help me with listening, I learned the basics. I then expanded upon basic Spanish by speaking to natives whenever I had the chance. I grew up in a small town of 6,000 in the upper South of the US back in the 70s/80s. There were no immigrants and few people with whom I could practice. There was no cable with Telemundo/Univision. Times have indeed changed since then! This is a great time to learn a language.

I also suggest that you try to find some children's dvds of cartoon series dubbed in Spanish. Some of the cartoons on Telemundo on Saturday mornings have captions for the hearing impaired that follow the audio fairly closely. Make sure you check those out to give you an idea of which series you should buy, or better yet, if you have a dvr...

The main thing that you need is that your daughter actually wants to learn Spanish. If she really wants to learn it, she will. If she doesn't have the passion or desire to learn, then the best resources on the planet will be of no help whatsoever. Where I feel school instruction falls short is in not properly motivating students to learn. A constant thread running through many of the comments on this forum is how useless many people felt their school foreign language instruction was- "I studied French for two years in high school and I couldn't order breakfast in Toulouse" is a common refrain.

Kids have to know why it is cool to know and speak a foreign language. I think it is important to go for conversation first rather than rote drills. Once a child feels like they can communicate on some level their desire to be better communicators/listeners/readers will lead them to studying grammar. I'm not an educator, just my opinion. I'm sure that others will differ.

Good luck

Edited by iguanamon on 19 May 2011 at 9:50pm

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HenryMW
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United States
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Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, French
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 Message 6 of 14
20 May 2011 at 7:07am | IP Logged 
alegnab wrote:
I have a daughter who will soon be 12 years old. She's mainly a visual learner. She's very weak with auditory learning, unless it's combined with visual (so something like Pimsleur would probably not work well for her).


I'm the same way. I used FSI Spanish when I was 16 and found it to be very good. They almost (some would say they actually) overdo the drills, but that was exactly what I needed. I did not enjoy Pimsleur. I need to see what I'm doing.

I also lucked out that my parish put all the ESL students in one school- my high school.
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Cavesa
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Czech Republic
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 Message 7 of 14
20 May 2011 at 3:19pm | IP Logged 
iguanamon wrote:

The main thing that you need is that your daughter actually wants to learn Spanish. If she really wants to learn it, she will. If she doesn't have the passion or desire to learn, then the best resources on the planet will be of no help whatsoever.


Very true. Proper motivation is always needed and you have much better chances to help her with that than school.

I'd say most modern courses book+audio could serve well. Since she won't be learning as a self-teacher and she won't be alone, you might use some of the popular fully Spanish textbooks used in courses (I can remember for exemple Nuevo Ven my friends used). They try to give many communicative exercises and are full of pictures and photos to at least catch attention, ideally to help remember things.

For vocabulary, there are several illustrated dictionnaries which might help and are way cheaper than computer programs like RS. I've seen two on Amazon but there are most probably many more.

Good luck.
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alegnab
Newbie
United States
Joined 4700 days ago

4 posts - 8 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish, French

 
 Message 8 of 14
08 June 2011 at 3:42pm | IP Logged 
Cainntear wrote:
I don't really believe in "visual learners" (or any other such type), but if they do exist, I can't see how someone who took to writing late could be considered visual...


I mentioned reading and not writing. My daughter was slow to read in comparison to my older children. I think we finished her instruction manual when she was 8 years old, so that’s not outside of the range of normal for children. She didn’t read much on her own after she learned to read, so it took her a long time to become proficient. The optometrist told me that she has a vision problem (not correctable with glasses) that keeps her from being able to focus on text for more than about 15 minutes at a time, so that is probably one reason she doesn’t spend a lot of time reading. Also, as to being late learning to read, even though she could see the text, she had to be able to associate the sounds with the phonograms, memorize them, and then learn to put those phonograms together into words, choosing the correct sounds for the words (and you know how English vowels/vowel combinations have lots of sounds) and putting the accents in the proper places. Some children catch onto that process fairly quickly, but others struggle with it.

As to learning primarily through auditory or visual means, she was in a program that required the child to memorize and recite Bible verses. I had a CD with the verses put to music. My older children had used it with great success. All they had to do was listen to a verse a few times, and they had it memorized. My daughter listened to it over and over and over again, but she was unable to memorize the verse. I worked with her, having her recite after me, but she still couldn’t memorize it. She could not memorize things until she was able to read, and then she didn’t have a problem with it.


iguanamon wrote:
The main thing that you need is that your daughter actually wants to learn Spanish.


She sort of does and sort of doesn't. She would like to know how to speak it, but she doesn't want to put forth a lot of effort. Three Bolivian ladies were coming to our church weekly, and she enjoyed saying some things to them, but those ladies now all have to work every day, and we don't see them anymore. So, my daughter has lost some incentive to learn.

Thank you all for your suggestions. I think I'm going to buy Assimil. She won't have to do much for that. Since it's a combination of audio and written text, she may do well with it. If she doesn't, at least I won't be out of a lot of money, since it's so cheap at Amazon. I think I'll use it myself, too.


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