Languages

Lest you think this is an actual word in Russian, it actually says “Languages” in a font called “Symbol” which in fact contains some Russian characters!

We are committed to learning a wide variety of languages in the Sculley Academy, for several reasons.

foreign languages helped Paul and me learn good grammar in English

we want to prepare our children for whatever God has for them, which will more than likely involve cross-cultural missions

learning other languages helps expand your vocabulary

peeking into other cultures it broadens your horizons, especially because they most likely influenced our own culture in the past

Asian ASL French German Italian Latin Russian Spanish
Audio Forum — comprehensive list of resources for the study of *many* languages

Languages we’ve studied:

German

1998 – 2003

We studied a little German each year in this time period, and hope to achieve fluency one day. I’m talking about me (I’ve forgotten so much)! Seriously, I’d love to have all the kids fluent in German, since it is the only language I’ve ever had a decent conversation in other than English, so I feel somewhat capable of helping them along! Plus we have a German Tante,Hildegard! Paul and I both took German in high school. I have found my knowledge of German to be incredibly helpful in communicating in a basic way in a wide variety of countries throughout Europe (a favorite memory was conversing in German about Australia with an Italian restaurant owner in a small town in France in the middle of the night!).

In the past we have used Deutsch Macht Spass, Powerglide, stories on tape, our many German kids books, First Thousand Words in German, Learn German the Fast and Fun Way, German Made Simple, plus anything else we can get our hands on!

Latin

2004 – 05

We continued with vol. II of the Latin Primer series.

2003 – 04

We continued our Latin Studies, using the Latin Primer series. We finished vol. I, and worked on vol II. this year.

2002 – 03

We’ve *finally* decided to take the plunge and learn Latin together, and started studying this in 2002-03. We’re using Latin Primer, vol I (of course!) as our text. P & J can be heard conjugating verbs, and their younger siblings, even the two-year-olds, love to repeat them, too! I can see already how much their vocabulary (and mine) have improved, simply by realizing the derivations of many words we use. I like this course because it requires very little preparation on my part, and the workbooks are interesting and easy to use. I did spend a little while learning proper pronunciation, but as Paul pointed out, no one actually speaks it, so the pronunciation isn’t as important as for other languages!

It took me a while to “come around” to Latin as an essential study, but became convinced after seeing how handy it would be to know what those Latin-based words actually mean in the areas of nature studies, other languages, Ancient Rome, not to mention most English words 🙂

Russian

2000 – 01, 2006 – 08 and continuing . . .

I know the linguists will cringe when I say this, but in a small way, Russian seems related to German, in my humble opinion! If you look it up on a language chart, they apparently come from different branches, but there are so many words pronounced the same, I was instantly hooked! Of course my trip to Russia with P in the summer of 2000 gave me the impetus to want to conquer this wonderful language. We spent a year *trying* to learn some Russian. The Russian alphabet is different from our own, so we have spent many brain-stretching hours with Mummy hunched over a book of first words in Russian, sounding like a preschooler slowly sounding out her first faltering words! We used Powerglide, First Thousand Words in Russian, Russian kids books, Learn Russian the Fast and Fun Way, plus anything else we can get our hands on!

2006 update . . . Karen started using Learnables in preparation for her trip. After Karen & M’s trip in February, and our new awareness that God is calling us to Russia, Karen is getting more intensive with Russian language studies, using Learnables, Promt translation, and emailing Russian buddies frequently. It’s a beautiful language, but challenging! March update — Paul and the children have begun studying Russian also, with language tutors Valya and Yana. We are now also using Pimsleur, Ultimate Russian, and a myriad of other materials, live teachers, etc!

Listen 2 Russian

Russian Grammar

American Sign Language

1997 – 99

We spent two years learning basic sign language. We will probably pick this up again in the future, since it is an invaluable way to communicate with a significant sector of our community. Plus it’s a great way to talk across a room! Handspeak is a wonderful web site–it has moving GIFs to actually show you how to do the sign! Great for visual learners like me 🙂 We’ve used the Joy of Signing (textbook plus workbooks) and many other signing resources (our library has dozens and dozens of sign language videos).

Future languages:

French

J did a class in French in 2001, and astounded me by being able to understand everything his teacher said in a totally French class demonstration. This was impressive, since it was only a 5 week class (3 hours per week of French immersion-style). Since my knowledge of French extends to counting to ten, yes, and no, I am looking forward to adding this to our studies in the future.

Spanish

2003 – 07 and beyond

We finally began our initial studies in Spanish! I chose the Learnables curriculum, which was a very good choice. In our first year of studies, we completed level 1 (which is apparently equivalent to a year of high school Spanish), and got about 1/4 of the way through level 2. The amazing thing is that the children and I are really grasping the language. I cannot recommend this curriculum highly enough! It really works!!

[Obviously this is “the” language to know around here. Many of our neighbors speak Spanish as their primary, or only, language. From my window here I can see neighbors from Argentina, Columbia, and El Salvador, and we have many other Hispanic neighbors further down the street. Plus we love Mexican restaurants, and it would be great to be able to sing along (or at least know if we *should* be singing along ;)).]

2007 update — Still continuing with Learnables — about to start level 4

Italian

I guess we should actually be learning Romanian, since we will most likely make a return trip to Romania one day, to show K & E where they were born. But the resources for learning that language are slim, and when we were there in 2001, we found out that there is a lot of overlap between Romanian and Italian, so Italian will probably be our Romance language of choice.

What about Asian languages?

That’s a good question. Over 3 billion people live in that part of the world! I studied Japanese for 3 years in high school, so that’s a possibility. Of course Chinese would be another good possibility! I recently found out the curriculum at my old primary school in Australia now includes Mandarin Chinese for 5th graders on up.