The year of three languages.

Mark and the three older kids are gone camping this weekend, and Saturday was cold and drizzly, and the house was already clean because Friday I had paid a person to come clean it, so I gave the two little boys leave to play quietly and watch videos while I dove deeply into hours and hours of brain work. 

About half of it I spent on Latin---plans for teaching it---and about half I spent on Somali---at a tedious but necessary stage of learning it.

And somewhere on my mental to-do list, Swedish is lingering around, and I'm going to have to turn to this eventually, in June or so.

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Somali first.  (My most recent post on learning Somali is here, containing links to earlier posts.)

I've been cruising through the textbook at seven pages per week, aiming to hit the reading goal by the time my little study group meets again in a month.  Mainly I advance through the book all at once in a few hours on a Saturday, making flash cards as I go out of the exercises, and I review the flashcards daily thereafter.

I didn't quite make my goal last week because when I ran up against declining nouns with the definite article appended, I couldn't hold all the different rules for spelling changes in my head at once.  

Summary of what I'm trying to learn. 

• Noun cases are subject, genitive, vocative, and absolutive (think none-of-the-above).  To change the case or the number, you change the ending, mostly, and also the stress-tone pattern.
• But when you append the definite article suffix, you have to use a fifth form, called the premodifier, that is unmarked for case.  It may have a different ending, too.
• The case marker appears instead in the choice of article:  -ta, or -tíi, or -ka, or kíi, for absolutive, and -tu, or -tii, or -ku, or -kii, for subject. 
• (-t- is for feminine nouns and -k- is for masculine nouns). 
• But for sound-production reasons, depending on the ending of the noun's premodifier form, a -t- may change to a -d- and the -k- may change to a -g- or a -h- or be deleted.  Also sometimes before -k- the last vowel of the noun changes to match the vowel of the article.
• In most of the declensions, pluralizing the noun changes its ending and its gender.

So far, given a noun, I learn the singular absolutive; the plural absolutive; then I learn how to change both to the premodifier form; then I have to decide "is it masculine or feminine?"; then I have to work out whether the ending is one that requires changing the -t- or -k- to something else; finally, if it's a -k-, whether I need to change a vowel too. 

(I'll get into the difference between, say, -ku and -kii, some other time.  I haven't entirely learned it.  The latter is kind of like a demonstrative, but with some additional layers.)

So, I didn't do very well on my first set of exercises, and I decided yesterday that what I really needed was to write out a whole lot of nouns from all seven declensions, one case and number at a time, so I could see the patterns.  Then I could sort the nouns in each declension into groups according to what happened to their endings.

Behold!  Ecce!  Waa kan!   I have about ten pages of this, organized by declension and number.

 

The issue here is that the book teaches the organization of nouns in a way that isn't the way I've had success in other languages.  I need to mentally hang each new noun on a "hook" that's, essentially, "nouns that decline just like this one."  There are more hooks in Somali than there are in Latin or French, but otherwise the process is essentially the same.  

So my next step is a Big Sort, and then I can start thinking about nouns, "Well, this one declines like saaxibad" and I'll be able to start hanging them up one at a time.

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Okay, moving on to Latin.  I'm going to save most of this for another series of posts, but I spent a lot of yesterday working out how to put all the different pieces of next year's Latin goals together.  I really, really love Lingua Latina, the curriculum I've now switched to, and the kids are enjoying it a lot; but it's super freeform compared to the Mother of Divine Grace lesson plans for Henle Latin , which I used with the kids who are now graduating.   

Last time, I needed the structure of MODG/Henle when I was learning along with the kids.  MODG's spiral-bound syllabus literally laid out exactly what the student was to do every single day, five days a week (which vocabulary to drill, which charts to recite, which grammar concepts to read about, which exercises to do) and had a complete set of quizzes and tests.  It's also set up for self-teaching.  

But the approach of Lingua Latina is much more fun for the next batch of kids (ages 11-15 now).  And I've got enough Latin under my belt that I can actually guide them through it.  (A motivated, language-loving, puzzle-solving sort of person could probably self-teach with it, but for all others it's better to have a guide.)  Incidentally, LL is fairly popular as a two-semester college course, which means that for me it will function as a two-year high school course and so I can get through about half of it next year.  I have a five-chapter head start so I'll do half of what's left, i.e., chapters VI through XX.

Anyway, besides working through the text, I need to do assessments, form drills, grammar reviews, some English grammar teaching, and additional cultural/historical stuff.  And figure out the best way to fit it into each week of two 90-minute classes (each class in two sessions with a break between) and two homework assignments.  So yesterday was Massive Spreadsheet Time, but everything I put in was a placeholder; later I have to go in and work out what pages to read for each assignment, etc.

I've generally worked out that I'll do each chapter in four class periods:  introduction, text, text, followup; introduction, text, text, followup.  We'll see if I can fit all the bits for each class into one 90-minute period plus one homework assignment.  

Don't @ me for putting in my spreadsheet, e.g., "Show me exercitia" instead of "Show me exercitiam."  I can't code-switch that quickly when I'm trying to organize.

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OK now, Swedish.

Not much advancement in that area, just a little tickle in the brain, but I'm pulling together the resources to pull one of my kids out of Latin and enroll him in adult language classes at the American Swedish Institute, which is a 30 minutes' walk from my house. 

The American Swedish Institute.

This is a classic case of Adapting the Homeschool to a Child's Specific Needs.  He is having a rough time of it in Latin with the other three kids, and he's not enjoying it at all.  Having dabbled with him in other languages here and there, I'm convinced that the problem isn't just that he Hates Latin; he is going to have to work disproportionately hard on any language, certainly harder than he wants to.

But... foreign language is not entirely optional.  Two years are required for freshman admissions at most four-year-colleges he might apply to.  Although there are of course numerous other options out there besides freshman admission into a four-year, he wants to have a shot at this path, and so we need to find a way to hit that minimum.  

So, this has been a mini-epiphany for me, the kind of person who always felt ashamed to be anything other than The Best or at least Near The Top.

Sometimes... the most important thing is hitting the minimum, and doing so with the least damage to other parts of the whole person.

And when you shift your focus from "what is the absolute optimal learning experience we can have, with the most joy and excitement and fascination and love of learning?" to "what is the best way for us to hit the minimum requirements?" --- you often wind up going in an entirely different direction.

I'll save some of that for another post, probably after we've gone to the ASI and had our introductory Swedish class.  Anyway, the point now is that I am trying to plan so that he can earn his two credits at half-pace, over four years.  I only have a vague idea at this point of how it's going to work, and to some extent we are at the mercy of the class schedule, which hasn't come out yet. 

So the extent of my preparation is a lot of muttering of  Please please please don't let his only choice be Monday evenings.  

This is going to be a very linguistic year.

Comments

[Kathy]

This is awesome. I especially appreciate your thoughts about how to hit the minimum. As an overachiever and wife to another overachiever, I have to sometimes keep in mind that this may be the goal sometimes.