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We live in California and personally know many Spanish speakers, including quite a few who don't speak English (our house cleaner and lots of our employees on the farm). Because of this it was a priority of mine to get my kids speaking Spanish at a somewhat younger age than Carrie suggested in the guides. I own Rosetta Stone Spanish and tried that with my oldest, but although we've spent over a year at it at one point and came back to it at a later stage, it really did not work well for my daughter.

We used all of Getting Started with Spanish and absolutely loved it! But now it is finished we find that Rosetta Stone is still a flop. I purchased LifePac Spanish 1 that Carrie recommends for high School (my daughter is in 6th grade) and my daughter is finding it extremely frustrating to the point of almost daily tears. I am only assigning her to do one exercise per day, but that alone is too much for her.

What I really want is something simple and easy and incremental like Getting Started with Spanish. Something that she could just do for a few minutes a day to continue learning (the more independent the better). At this point I just want to give up - or maybe redo some of Getting Started with Spanish.

Any suggestions?

My 8yo and I are enjoying Duolingo. It isn't traditional, but it is effective and enjoyable for her.

I'm no help to you at all, but I do have a question. Would you be willing to elaborate on why Rosetta stone didn't work for you? I was considering it for my severely dyslexic son for next year. I loathe having to make him learn another language, but it's a requirement. I can't use a program that requires reading or writing the foreign language. Thanks!

I think the verbs were the biggest problem for her. The program seemed to assume that after going through the exercises you will pick up on the different forms of the verbs and how to use them correctly. After doing Rosetta Stone for about a year she didn't understand that "soy, eres, es" and so on are all forms of the same verb and she didn't know how to use any of them correctly. As a result she was getting a lot of things wrong in the end-of-chapter sections. I didn't watch her doing it much at all (too busy with the younger ones), but it seemed that in the lessons where it introduced new material slowly she was happy enough, but when it got to pulling all the information together to do an end of chapter review (or whatever they call it), she was at a loss. One time she called me in to tell me that she just couldn't even figure out what she was supposed to do before it was beeping at her to say she was wrong. In this example it showed a woman holding a cup of water saying "I am drinking water" in Spanish. Apparently she was supposed to orally say the Spanish for "What are you drinking?" She complained that she didn't know whether to say "What are you doing?" or "What is in the cup?" and even if she did know what to say, she wasn't sure that she could think how to say those things in Spanish. Long before she had said anything the computer was beeping at her for being wrong. Now I will say that my daughter is a perfectionist and likes to be sure of herself and hates to get things wrong. So when the computer beeps like that she gets frustrated pretty quickly.

She did learn quite a bit of vocabulary from Rosetta Stone, but she didn't learn enough grammar to be able to put things together to make sentences. The program seemed to assume that she would pick up these grammatical ideas without explicitly teaching it - but she didn't. Then when she was supposed to use verbs correctly or make her own sentences she did poorly and got frustrated.

I think Rosetta Stone would have worked better for her alongside a workbook or something that would teach grammatical concepts. But perhaps that is not what you want for your dyslexic son. There was some reading and typing in Rosetta Stone, but I think they can be turned off. The voice recognition thing was frustrating at first in Rosetta Stone b/c even when her pronunciation seemed pretty perfect it would beep that it was wrong. Then we figured out that you can set the program to be less demanding in the voice recognition and that helped a lot.

If you have access to a native speaker, I would have her start trying to talk with them conversationally if they will. Whether they speak English or not doesn't matter. To be fluent in a language, you have to truly use it in day to day life. I would just get her talking with the native speakers and see how it goes. Maybe get a bilingual speaker to ask if the person is willing to work with your child to learn to speak the language.

The Lifepac Spanish is very challenging even for a high schooler. I can't imagine a 6th grader trying to do it. I know there are many spanish programs for younger kids, I would probably check out some of those. We used Duolingo last summer just to keep Spanish in his brain.

Thank you, everyone! Yes, Lynn - I think the Lifepac is just too challenging for her at this age. I guess Getting Started in Spanish was such a hit, I thought we could just keep going with Carrie's suggestions. Oh well, live and learn... I'll save it for high school.

Tidbits - I have thought about using our housekeeper for this purpose, but my daughter is too shy to approach her casually to talk, and if we were going to have her actually do a kind of "lesson," we would obviously have to pay her for that. It's a great idea to have her talk with a native speaker, so maybe that would be worth it. I'll talk to my husband about that idea.

We tried Duolingo yesterday. She took the placement test. So far so good. It will be funny if, after all I've spent on Spanish programs a free one turns out to be the winner!

Thank you all!

If you decide it doesn't work so well, I would look at Visual Links Spanish. I have used it for myself and it is really good for conversation. Where I work, there are a lot of Spanish speaking people and I need to understand some Spanish to survive.

I'll throw one other idea in the hat - you could possibly just delay Spanish for a year or two! It seems time is all that is needed for a skill that was once like pulling teeth to become a fairly easy acquisition with a year or two of maturity! I have found this with many things with myself and with my children. There are seasons for everything, and maybe by simply setting it aside for awhile, your daughter would come back to it more mature and joyfully. You will know best what the two of you would like to do though!

In Christ,
Julie