Answered questions:

QUESTION:
    I last saw you at the conference in Portland. I originally met you at your class which I observed when I was considering your program for my 7-year-old.

    My daughter, 13, has taken Latin and Spanish with tutors in our home.  She is currently registered for Spanish 2 through the local school district.  I am considering putting her in a different program since I didn't feel she is learning enough in this setting.

    She was the only 7th grader in Spanish 1 with all 9th graders last year.  She knew almost everything they covered.

    I am nervous that only meeting one time/week is not enough to get her fluent.  Do you tutor outside of your class time.  I want her conversing in Spanish often.

    She is traveling next June for a short-term missions trip (with dad & brother).

    Do you still have room in your Spanish class this summer?  She is probably level 2.

    Any input you have will be appreciated!  Thank you!

    May God Bless You Today,

ANSWER:

To answer your questions, it's great to see such an enthusiastic and ambitious mom for her daughter's learning. Your concern about meeting just one day a week is legitimate. God did a good job of mixing languages up at the Tower of Babel. But, fortunately He also did a good job of gifting the Church to straighten out the language mess and difficulty of learning (Acts 2-4).

The best Spanish learning would occur in a fully comprehensible immersion setting, full time for months on end, with no English breaks at all. That way a student would become a very fluent speaker in a matter of about 3-6 months. There are some situations like this, too; they're called homestays while attending a Spanish language school. If you really want your daughter to become fluent as fast as possible, this is the way to do it. Or, she could go on a 6 month mission trip where nothing but Spanish is spoken. 13 years of age is young for this, but not at all prohibitive.

Otherwise, you are left to piecing together an alternative way of accomplishing the same goal while here in the US. One possibility for this is a Spanish immersion school. The trouble with this, of course, is that it's not homeschooling, and all of the Spanish immersion schools that I know of are government funded, evolutionist-teaching, and all the rest. But, in one year of school immersion your daughter would be fluent, or nearly fluent.

Other than that, a program that uses TPRS (not TPR) is the only way to go. This is what I offer, but I only do it one day per week, per site location, because most homeschool parents only want to make the trek to class one day per week - they are juggling full loads. I supplement the one day with a component of TPRS homework during the week, which helps, but it's not as good as being in class, in Spanish, all day, every day.

The bottom line as for my advice to you is, if you do not want to do one of the above full-time options, to do the following:

1) Get your daughter reading tons of material in Spanish; you can start with very simple children's books from the library.
2) Get her plugged in to multiple e-pals (pen pals online) from Spanish-speaking cultures.
3) Have her join my Spanish class - she will learn a lot there.
4) Have her keep a running list of all of the new words that she encounters on a pocket notebook. Transfer these words to the computer and print them out in flashcard format. Have her learn the flashcards and, when learned, put the flashcards up on her bedroom wall, Spanish side up, so that she can view them when she wakes up and goes to bed.
5) Pray for her success. (This should have been #1.)
6) Attend a Spanish-speaking church service regularly, maybe just as a supplement to your present church.
7) Meet Hispanics and have them over for meals, etc.
8) Learn Spanish with her. (Parents are free in my classes.)
9) Link her up with students in Latin American countries by Skype for live-chat time.
10) Watch movies with subtitles on and use the pause button as often as necessary to understand the Spanish.
11) Memorize verb conjugations, and know the meanings of the various conjugations.
12) Get Spanish worship music with the lyrics and learn lots of songs.

If you do these things consistently for one year, she should be speaking fairly well by the end of the year.

I hope this helps. If you have any more questions, please feel free to ask,

Brad


Question: I was wondering whether there was any difference between present perfect conjugation, and simply present conjugation.

Answer: The present perfect uses the verb "have" plus the past participle of another verb, such as "I have eaten." The explanation for the Spanish form is here: http://www.123teachme.com/learn_spanish/present_perfect_past_indefinite_theory
The simple present tense is like saying "I eat." The conjugated forms can be found here: http://www.123teachme.com/learn_spanish/spanish_verbs
Sr.Riegg

Question: I'm not sure what os means like in "Dios os ama." Brian
Answer: "os" is an object pronoun, like "le" in the question, below. It means "you all (casual). In "Dios os ama" it means "God love you all". Please see the answer, below, for more details.
 
Question: What does "le" mean?
Answer: It is an indirect object pronoun that means him/her/it/you (formal). Learn more here: http://www.123teachme.com/learn_spanish/pronombres_de_objeto_indirecto_3
and here: http://www.studyspanish.com/lessons/iopro1.htm

Q" Does the word "ido" mean "gone" as in "they have gone" rather than missing? ido is used mostly with the "helper verb" haber, i.e., han ido (they have gone). Ido is a past participle, so in normally needs the other verb.
     And just making sure but "montar" (or other conjugations) is the right word for ride, correct? Sometimes when I looked it up it would come up as "mount". It means both ride and mount. But, it does not mean mount and then ride, i.e., it doesn't have the sense of actually moving to a distinct location. So, a different word is needed to show that movement to a certain place occurred after they got on their horses.
     Also, how exactly are the words "estuvieron" and "estaba" supposed to be used? I suppose they are both forms of "estar".Estuvieron is in the preterite tense, which connotes a definitive time period in the past. Estaban is in the imperfect tense which connotes an open/non-distinct time in the past. This is one of the three hardest parts to understand about how Spanish works, because in English we do not have two separate past tenses. For more info on this, look here: http://www.123teachme.com/learn_spanish/preterite_vs_imperfect   Thanks again for doing this! I writing stories is really helping me to think more in Spanish! That's GREAT. Keep it up; your stories are helping the whole class and other classes, as well.
Sr. Riegg
Hadley


Sr. Riegg,
As I was getting the slides ready for the Spanish alphabet, I was searching for a vowel diagram to include, and found this site.  http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/ 
It could be really useful for the students to get on here and explore and compare the phonetics of American English phonetics with the phonetics of Spanish.  The terminology will take some getting used to, but it has videos of wordlists and an animation of the mouth showing the place of articulation for each sound.
Nathan

Moriah asked: I have heard many different words for boy and girl including chica/chico, nina/nino, and muchacha/muchacho.  Which one is right?

Answer: They are all right but mean slightly different things in different places. For more info on this, check out:
http://spanish.about.com/od/spanishvocabulary/a/muchacho_chico.htm
Sr.Riegg

Moriah asked: At Spanish class we learned that morado was purple.  I am now a little confused because one of the Spanish links said that violeta was purple, which one is right?

Answer: Violeta is light purple and morado is a darker purple.
Check out: http://spanish.about.com/od/adjectives/a/colors.htm

Submit any and all questions here.