Watching my son learn Spanish (not being immersed) is kind of painful. It's been six months. You should know how the vowels sound.
I went to a French playgroup (kindergarten in the UK) as well as weekly after school lessons until aged 14 or so. It really helped me at school and whilst mumblemumble years later, my speech is VERY rusty, my comprehension and reading ability is high and my accent is great, so I can sound authentically stupid in French.
No but it's my biggest hope that we'll start one here. It won't be in time for my kids either but it's ridiculous that we don't have it and it would be annoying to all the white flight-y parents since there aren't any others on our side of the river.
I teach immersion. Kids can pick up rough conversational language almost instantly, and they'll be fine doing that. But to be good they'll eventually need to memorize all 15 trillion conjugations and you're going to need motivation, else they'll never move beyond pidgin. Also, if the Spanish components aren't being taught mostly by Spanish L1 speakers I would be most suspicious.
Not quite the same, but: English Canada has very popular French Immersion programs in most public school boards. I graduated from one, and my kids go to one now. It's overall a very positive thing, and my wife and I never even really considered sending our kids to "English" school. Immersion programs are great! your kids will love it!
Caveats, though:
1. In Canada, FI is how lots of WUMC parents try to give their kids an educational advantage. It's part of the public school system, is free, and there's no entrance exam, but the culture (and geographic placement) of FI has race and class issues. In part, this means that some of the educational benefits of FI come from the benefits of engaged parents, peer effects, and the schools encouraging kids with behavioural issues or learning difficulties to switch into English. "Free private school in the public system" is a common description. (This is a bad thing, but it's a thing.) Not sure if you'd get the same thing in Spanish Immersion, for good and for ill.
2. FI doesn't typically graduate fluent French speakers. Most graduates can get by just fine in French, and with further practice can *get* fluent, but the school by itself won't do it. Kids can graduate FI high school with pretty terrible French. Mine was quite good when I graduated, but I had a francophone parent and grandparents and cousins to talk to. Without lots of exposure outside the school, fluency just won't happen. Probably Spanish Immersion would take place in a context where that exposure is easier to find than in, say, an all anglo city in Canada 2 provinces away from Quebec.
3. My teachers were all francophones. A generation later, my kids' teachers are mostly anglo FI graduates. So my kids don't get to talk to actual fluent, properly-accented French speakers except when they talk to their grandfather (and he mostly speaks to them in English). That doesn't make me confident that they'll end up with a great command of the language.
4. The educational benefits of learning another language really do extend way beyond learning the other language. That's really clear to me now, watching my kids.
Do they learn real French or the Canadian bastardization of French?
Mutatis mutandis, everything in 7 is also true in Roc Island.
My kid is too young, but our school system has dual language Spanish/English programs. Parents were initially skeptical, but now they are expanding the program as fast as they can attract licensed teachers with spanish as their first language to teach in it. They also keep the students half and half as far as language spoken at home, but so far that hasn't been a limiting factor.
If they want to evaluate the program properly, they should randomly assign students' households a language to speak at home.
I can echo 3. At this point, my son is in his fourth year of 4 day a week elementary school Spanish, and his Spanish is still worse than mine (which is saying something).
Vamos! Es un libro de cocina!
Newt and Sally both did immersion K-5th, and it was great -- I've talked about it a lot. They aren't native-speaker fluent, but they're both pretty successfully literate/conversational in Spanish. (A little less than they were in fifth grade, I think -- dropping back to one Spanish class rather than immersion hurt them. But they both spent high school tracked with the native speaker/heritage speaker Latin@ kids, rather than with the kids learning Spanish from scratch.)
Downsides -- it didn't work for all the Anglo kids. Newt and Sally were at the top end of outcomes for kids who came in with no Spanish, and they had both had a Spanish-speaking babysitter from infancy. A bunch of Anglo kids transferred out in third grade when they couldn't take not understanding what was going on any more. (I knew some of those kids, and they had still learned a whole lot of Spanish by American grade school standards, but not enough to be happy about spending two and a half days a week trying to function in Spanish only.)
And even for Sally and Newt, it made grade school much harder than it would have been otherwise. I think this wasn't a bad thing -- difficult wasn't necessarily unhappy, exactly -- but kindergarten, for example, was a whole lot of tensely not having any idea what was going on.
My friend's cousin went to a Spanish immersion school (K-8). He lived in Barcelona for 1-2 years in preschool, and his father (white, non-hispanic) was also a Spanish teacher. He tested as having native-speaker fluency on some fancy test his senior year of high school.
I know people who did Japanese immersion and didn't end up fluent but ended up pretty decent. Interestingly, most of them were 4th and 5th gen Japanese-Americans whose parents wanted them to reconnect with their roots.
8: Neither?
I learned a funny combination of grammatically proper 'français de France', Canadian federal civil service 'fonctionnaire French', and the Acadian French, since my teachers (and father) were all Acadians. That was all well and good, but turns out to be less than useless for ordering a drink at a bar in Quebec City. Quebeçois French is a whole other thing. (It has the best swearing, though!)
As best I can tell, my kids are learning 'fonctionnaire French'
As mentioned recently, my daughter did German immersion K-12. She hasn't spoken it much in the 13 years since graduating, sfaik, but I think she could slip right back in without much difficulty if she ended up in a German speaking country.
Spanish immersion sounds like a really good idea in TX. I mean, sure, it's only going to be as good as the teachers and administrators make it, but I'd guess that the social factors identified by our new Canadian friend come into play on that.
Also, they can interpret for you once you're all refugees in Juarez.
Jeez, Heebie, it's like you don't even read our blog.
Hey baby, have you ever been immersed in a Spaniard? Wait, that doesn't work...
19: I do! I mean, I check in on it. Do I have to go to Spain to make it work?
Blogs work wherever there's an internet.
Some internets are more equal than others.
I wish I had a Mandarin immersion program as a kid, instead of just enough "Chinese school" to hate it. It was more "culture" than language; learn to write the characters in your name instead of learn to communicate.
I've been thinking about getting learn mandarin software with an audio component I could play in the car, but I probably wouldn't learn well that way.
Not required but highly recommended. People tell us our youngest now has an accent indistinguishable from her classmates. At work when I was discussing plans for living somewhere for Spanish immersion, someone suggested going to live in Texas.
The recently changed the early years of our school's program. It used to be 50/50 starting with JK (and of course we get free JK because socialism) which our first two kids got, but then by our third they made JK and K 80% Spanish since they figured most of the native Spanish speakers were getting plenty of English outside anyway. You can easily see the difference with his ability to understand- in 1st/2nd* grade he's more comfortable writing in Spanish than in English now. Our youngest has had the most exposure, she went to an immersion daycare center and now living in Spain she could probably go back and enter as a native in either language.
Our program is K-8, kids going into HS usually take AP Spanish in 9th grade, but then they have to take a third language to meet the course requirements for graduation because you have to take two years of a language regardless of your background. Some kids lose their Spanish because there are no more courses although you can take e.g. Spanish Lit classes at local universities.
*Age cutoff is different so he'd be in 1st in US but is in 2nd here; when we go back he'll go back with his cohort and do 2nd in US.
Some kids lose their Spanish because there are no more courses
Sally and Newt have run into that -- Sally finished her high school's Spanish courses in tenth grade, and hasn't had any for the last two years, but I will be nagging her to get back to it in college. Newt is in tenth grade now, and had some scheduling weirdness where he had a conflict preventing him from taking AP Spanish this year, so he'll take it next year (and the school, weirdly but in a sort of good weird way, decided that he should lose a couple of study halls and sit in on AP Spanish this year without getting a grade for the class for the two periods a week he can, so as not to get too rusty. I'm kind of amazed he went for this, but it does seem like a good idea.)
27: Are community college courses an option?
Not impossible, but too much of a hassle/time commitment what with everything else they've got going on. Sally's done, anyway -- in the fall she can take Spanish wherever she's in college. (As of now, she's accepted to SUNY Stonybrook, but the rest of the schools she's applied to won't have decisions until later in the spring.)
The only university faculty member I know who expressed support for Trump went to Stonybook.
If she ends up there I'll email you for the name so that she can glower unsettlingly at him. She's really good at that.
He went there back in the 80s. He's in Ohio now, but Columbia is probably more directly responsible.
Oh. Sending her to Ohio for the sole purpose of glowering seems like overkill.
33:
My department chair in an elite private university in a big west coast city is a Trump supporter. You can send her here.
There's a dual immersion program (Spanish/English) available here for us, too. I'm really not sure what to do. The Calabat has some exposure to Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic (other kids' home languages) through his preschool as they introduce vocab words for classroom objects and foods; the main result is that he pronounces "tortilla" as if he were a native speaker. It would be great if he came out of it learning another language but without a way to reinforce it at home it seems like it might just make elementary school into an obstacle course.
It worked out well for us, and we didn't have any home reinforcement. I kind of liked the obstacle course aspect as making elementary school more involving -- it's so easy for a bright kid to get bored because they're not challenged at all in grade school. But it is a tossup, of course. Like I said, some kids were miserable and transferred to all-English programs.
How else does one pronounce tortilla?
Getting the vowels actually sounding Spanish, and the Spanish 'r' is a big difference. That is something that's been cracking me up listening to my kids since first grade -- even speaking English, if they hit a Spanish loan word, the accent flips hard over to Spanish (coyote, guerilla (this one's extra funny, because the English version is very far from what it sounds like in Spanish), whatever).
My sister in law is Peruvian, so my older nephew speaks mostly English, but some Spanish. My mom's apartment is "Grandma's house" but he and Mommy live "en casa". He tells me, "No funciona, Uncle! Fix it, fix it!"
Come to think, I guess they don't do that anymore -- that faded a while back. They only pronounce things in Spanish when they're actually speaking Spanish these days. It was incredibly cute while it lasted, though.
39, 40: What LB said. It's not just tor-tee-ya, but he nails the O and the R in a way I'd have to really think about if I wanted to say it. It's like having a mini Alex Trebek around.
My brother and I make his son speak to us in French and then we try not to crack up over his head. He's had French teachers (African) at his preschool and now he's at a French (Catholic) immersion school. It really is charming to have a 5 year old sound like a little French man. Something about rolled r's is just the best. He can also say his prayers in French (but not English) but those sound more like English-speakers singing Frère Jacques.
Come to think, email if you have any questions about "what's Spanish language immersion like as a kid doing it" that you'd want me to pass on to Sally and Newt. I'm not sure that they have much more to say about it than I've said, but they might. Email linked from my name.
https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/enchilada/n9970?snl=1
This was a long time ago.
If I try to say 'tortilla' in the most Spanish way I can manage, it seems like the 't' is also significantly different from English--softer, a little bit closer to 'th', if I have it right. Which I might not.
I had eleven years of Spanish in school, but only a few of those were with good teachers, and I didn't start until 2nd grade. Which left me not at all able to hold a meaningful conversation in Spanish. On the other hand, even now, 17 years since taking a class, I can read a fair amount and follow the gist of a conversation (at least from speakers with certain accents). Even that level of semi-proficiency seems worthwhile, to me. I wish I had it in more languages.
Does Spanish aspirate syllable-initial t's?
I can't even answer that question for English.
48 -- The video in 46 doesn't answer the question?
48: No. That's most likely what essear is referring to.
I think the softness of the Spanish 't' is because it's 'denti-alveolar', so your tongue lies along the alveolar ridge behind your teeth and the tip just touches the base of the teeth themselves. (As opposed to the English 't', where the tip of the tongue touches the alveolar ridge.)
All these new languages are messed up. We need to go back to the one with all the clicking sounds. Because bandwidth.
Yeah, on second thought 52 is probably what essear is describing.
Or, as Nabokov said:
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. Note the denti-alveolar 't'."
49
Too bad your parents didn't send you to an English immersion school.
47. There are umpteen dialects of Spanish. Cuban and Chilean, for example are almost different languages. (See also English.) When you try to pronounce something in the most "Spanish" way you can manage, where on the map are you thinking of? My guess would be that aspirating initial plosives is a thing in some places and not others.
I do worry a bit that my son's Spanish teacher is Chilean. Why not a normal Spanish-speaking country?
Spanish without poverty and incessant turmoil just isn't the same.
Apparently, somebody in El Salvador beat a caged hippopotamus to death. It's a rough place.
52: yeah, that's the feature I had in mind. Which I think is fairly widespread across Spanish accents, contra 57.
Also re what might be the suggestion in 48 and 57, I don't think the softness of the Spanish 't' is about aspiration. The denti-alveolar 't' that sounds typically Spanish is unaspirated. You can add an aspiration to it but then you get another sound entirely, which appears in some languages as a separate phoneme to the unaspirated version.
57, 62: Yeah, while there are a whole bunch of different Spanish accents, I've been exposed to lots of them, and as a non-native speaker, the differences don't pop out for me (barring Spain-Spanish, which my kids refer to as Spain-ish. The lisped 'c's, I can hear.) The sort of things that make someone sound like a native Spanish speaker to an English speaker are, I think, common across most accents.
Specifically on the 't' thing, I think the deal is that the Spanish 't' is slightly voiced -- not all the way to being a 'd', but closer than an English 't'. If you pronounce tortilla 'dor-dee-ya', it's not right, exactly, but there's something there.
Let's all become Wikipedia experts!
The phonemes /t/ and /d/ are laminal denti-alveolars ([t̪, d̪]). The phoneme /s/ becomes dental [s̪] before denti-alveolar consonants, while /θ/ remains interdental [θ̟] in all contexts.
"non-native speaker" in 65 should be corrected to "non-speaker".
66: Oh, really? And I suppose those threads full of bee-powered manhood-enhancement advice never happened?
65: I know what you mean but I'm wondering whether it's actually a voicing on the 'll' (voiced palatal fricative?) that we're hearing.
Late but here's some thoughts.
80-20 immersion has worked great for the kid, he's fluent although I can sometimes still out-vocab him on 90's era slang and literary language. He's on track to stay through terminale-12th grade and take the french baccalauréat.
Some of the factors I think have been relevant for us -
I speak French and lived in France so school and curriculum haven't been opaque, if at times hilarious Frenchy French.
The French teachers are all native speakers and members of French teachers union, and the school follows the national curriculum, so no wondering about teacher language level or curriculum choices, it either works or doesn't if you see what I mean. It isn't obscure or dodgy.
Student body has high proportion of kids from France or speaking French in the home with French parent(s). There's lots of socializing in French, in fact I don't think it is a good choice for English language learners.
The school told us to expect a sort of delay with both languages around ages 8-9, and then leap forward thereafter, tbh I didn't notice either.
I had a friend take her daughter out of a 50-50 Spanish immersion program in a public school in Sonoma county. She was not comfortable with the level of language instruction and the feeling the Spanish speakers' (overwhelmingly children of stable, skilled non-migrant ag workers) shot at English acquisition being sacrificed to the desire of the parents of the English speakers for their own kids to learn Spanish.
She was not comfortable with the level of language instruction and the feeling the Spanish speakers' (overwhelmingly children of stable, skilled non-migrant ag workers) shot at English acquisition being sacrificed to the desire of the parents of the English speakers for their own kids to learn Spanish.
Huh. Programs are different, but I thought the one my kids were in was very successful for the English learners -- not sacrificing them at all. What with the half-time immersion in English, and the amount of English they were exposed to outside of school, all the initially monolingual-Spanish speaking kids seemed perfectly fluent to me, when I interacted with them, by second or third grade. And by having been instructed academically in their dominant language all along, they hadn't dropped behind the Anglo kids while they were learning solid English.
I wonder what accounts for the different experiences.
As a parent of English speakers (give or take), I gladly confess my desire for little Gabriela across the street to stay fluent enough in English to keep selling us Girl Scout cookies. A++ would buy again!
73: I don't know, obvs, but suspect it was partly because an inordinate amount of time was spent cramming for standardized tests, plus most of these kids were probably in a Spanish monolingual world outside of school. Even a stable, non migrant and relatively prosperous ag worker community in N Ca is going to be pretty Spanish mono lingual.