Don't you hate learning vocabulary?
Isn't that the worst part of learning a foreign language? I know that vocabulary lists are not easy, but we have found an easy way to learn Spanish with no vocabulary lists!
We are using
The Learnables Spanish curriculum, which can come in a CD-ROM for
The Learnables portion of the study
or with audio CDs and books.
The Learnables are the colored red and yellow books pictured below, and are the books in which there is no reading. Only listening and looking at the pictures.
►The other books that include listening, pictures, and reading,
Basic Structures and
Grammar Enhancement,
only come in books and audio CDs. (as of 2009)
We use the audios and book for all of it. (We didn't have a good computer when I first ordered these, but also they're more portable for us since we don't have a laptop.)
It is like a book of flashcards, but you do not look on the back to see if you are correct, because for the first three or four months, you simply listen and look at the 'cards' in the book. You keep up with the native Spanish speaker by listening to what number he is on. So it is like vocabulary, but there is no trying to see if you're right, and then getting it wrong. ("
un-teaching" yourself)
After you have listened and learned numbers 1-10, you begin your first lesson. The speaker says the number of the exercise, and the words and phrases are repeated twice. The speaker will come back to new words rather quickly. There are sound effects for some words and phrases so you'll know what action is being done. By the end of Lesson 1,
your first day, you are hearing and understanding short sentences in the present tense, the difference between big and small, and two objects together joined with "and". Keep listening to this lesson for one to two weeks, until you have learned it well.
I have studied with
The Learnables curriculum in the past, and I am using it this year with my daughter. After three days, she said when she heard a word or phrase, the pictures were beginning to pop into her mind.
This is a big plus, because many people can speak a foreign language after studying it, but have a hard time understanding spoken words by another person. I know this is true from my own trip to Mexico after a year of learning high school Spanish
from a native speaker. I had learned more to speak than to listen. However, my teacher's daughter (who also went on the trip) had heard some Spanish at home even though the parents primarily spoke English (her mom is American-born, and since they lived here, they spoke mostly English for the kids). And although she had not taken a Spanish class and didn't know how to conjugate verbs, or even know how to say some words
I could say, she could understand more of what her Mexican cousins and relatives were saying than I could.
The first book,
The Learnables 1 (with 4 CDs), is 10 lessons, with 100 images each (some repeated, some combined with other words in other pictures for phrases or sentences), which takes about a week or two for each lesson. Just listen to it a couple of times each day (around 20 minutes each time), only moving on to the next lesson when you are sure you know all the phrases or sentences
in your mind. The first book can take a total of 10-20 weeks, depending on your background with Spanish.
Below is a partial lesson. To save time, parts of the lesson are skipped.
Subsequent lessons add new words and new phrases & sentences, while using the words from previous lessons.
You will note that in the beginning, the speaker only says the word itself, then adds la or el in front of it. You may want to ask your child what the speaker does differently when he first introduces a word, then what does he add to it later?
I find this works better for my kids than just simply telling them. 🙂
Apologies for the poor audio quality! The CD player sounded loud and clear sitting beside me, but did not record well.
This can seem rather dull at first, but as more vocabulary is introduced, the pictures evolve into stories that keep students involved and interested.
After completing
The Learnables 1 (the red book), the student goes on to
Basic Structures 1 (105 pages, with 3 CDs), where they get to Read Along with the Spanish CDs and see pictures. These are sentences and short paragraphs comprised of the words already learned in
The Learnables. These lessons also are meant to be paced and reviewed. (I think I remember reading in the front of the book that each lesson should be gone over at least three times.) The workbook part of the lesson can't be redone unless answers are written in a notebook, but reading the paragraphs along with the CD can. =)
This does not seem like enough work for an entire year of homeschool Spanish, but keep in mind, it is meant to be reviewed often before going to the next step.
Total for 1st year = 2 books, 7 CDs.
The second year has an additional book,
Spanish Grammar Enhancement 1, (280 pages, with 4 CDs) which is to be used first before beginning
The Learnables 2, (12 lessons, with 4 CDs) and
Basic Structures 2 (360 pages, with 7 CDs)
The Learnables 2 and
Basic Structures 2 are like the 1st year books, but with longer and more complex sentences.
Total for 2nd year = 3 books, 15 CDs
We plan on beginning Spanish Grammar Enhancement 1 near the end of this school year instead of waiting for next fall.
Didn't happen! But we'll get it.
The
Grammar Enhancement book has many sentences with the same verb, then introduces new ones, then mixes them so the student will learn when to use them. It does the same for pronouns, prepositions, and singular/plurals. For
Grammar Enhancement, I plan for the kids to listen to about 20-25 pages a day (25 min or so), (and for
Basic Structures, maybe fewer pages ? because they look longer) but to do these 2, or maybe 3 days in a row. Somewhere in the front of the book, it says to do everything at least twice.
These CDs use 6 different speakers.
Pictured at the top of this post are pages from The Learnables 1. Here's a link to
sample pages in the other books. Click to enlarge.
The
computer version sample online (of the CD-ROM version of
The Learnables books -- remember, I only pictured the book version here)
only shows the first 10 images, which does not really show you how it really works, in my opinion. The pictures do not "come into your mind" because you do not get far enough into the lesson for this to start happening. Update: To the right of the current sample shown, you can click on a Level. Level 1 shows Lesson 4, which is what students would be learning during weeks 7 and 8.
But you can hear how it sounds, and see how the computer version would work.
See the above video/link to see how they learn, and are learning sentences beginning their first day.
at the end of each your posts.
