trying another language!

Although only in his third year of primary school, Simon has to begin learning a new modern language this year. We had the choice between English, German and Spanish. It seemed a bit silly to choose English, and a waste of an opportunity to learn a new language, so we didn't consider that for long. Neither Marc nor I had done any German since secondary school, so we didn't feel capable of helping Simon much with that. But since I studied Spanish for three years at university, and felt it would probably come back to me quickly, we signed him up for Spanish.

I was also confident that the resources provided would be comprehensive ... and they are! We have to cover sixty lessons (of about an hour) this year, which means trying to do two a week when we are at home. We got started last week, so have already done two lessons, and it is fun! To be honest, I don't think their method is the absolute best (that's the problem with having a doctorate in linguistics, three teaching qualifications and a lot of experience learning and teaching languages!) but there is a lot of listening to "real" Spanish speakers, which is great.

The only problem really is that the majority of the sound files are only available on-line ... which means that if we have a day like yesterday where the internet connection was flat-lining in the afternoon, we either have to scrape by with me doing the talking (not at all ideal!) or wait for another day (let's hope it works better this afternoon!).

It is also very different for Simon to learn a language academically rather than just picking it up orally and on a need-to-know basis. But at least I don't have the problem of a child who doesn't even understand the concept of a foreign language ... I know some small children think foreigners must have to translate from English in their heads before saying anything in their own language!