I absolutely love the idea of speaking several languages. Personally, I do not speak a foreign language well but one day it may change. The children, on the other hand, have the time and the resources to learn multiple languages. We already speak a 2nd languages in the home which is German. German is a must and is not considered a foreign language.
The first real foreign language is French. Some of the small people have been taking it off and on for several years now. They have been to French Saturdays school, college classes and several French tutors. It would move faster if they were able to speak more often.
There is also Japanese and a little bit of Italian, Old English and Farsi. There are so many wonderful resources to use for self learning and home schooling. In my world, I would love to have the children learn a Romance language; a language that contains a few new sounds and the alphabet is a little different and then a completely unfamiliar language. For example, first learn Italian, Romanian, or Spanish, then Russian or Greek and lastly Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic or Hebrew.
When they learn a language well, they can branch off to other languages within the language family. Knowledge of German can lead to having an easier time learning languages such as Swiss German, Dutch, Yiddish and Afrikaans.
In my mind, it would be fun to read Beowulf in Old English.
The resources for language learning are fantastic. Netflix has two different programs available. The first one is Language Learning with Netflix. With this one, you can listen to the TV series or movie in your foreign language and see the subtitles in your foreign language and in your naive language. You can click on a word to see the definition and pronunciation of the word. You can change the speed of the speaking for better understanding.
Ling Q is the other resource you can use with Netflix. You have to download the ling Q import extension into Netflix. The TV series or movies must have the language you want to import into ling Q. The entire vocabulary for the series or film is available in dialogue form to learn.
Here are some of the foreign language resources we have used or plan to use.
- www.busuu.com
- www.lingq.com/en/
- www.babbel.com
- www.mangolanguages.com
- iwillteachyoualanguage.com
- fluent-forever.com/app/
- linguisticator.com
- www.memrise.com
- www.mimicmethod.com (his classes are now free)
- learn.languageboost.biz
- vocabularylabs.com (this is for how to learn)
- talkbox.mom
- ai.glossika.com/home
- www.talkinarabic.com
- www.fluentfarsi.com
- fsi-languages.yojik.eu (this is old but good. There are copies of the fsi beware. It should be free.)
- Sign up for Anki to learn flash cards
- Italki (online tutoring)
There are plenty of other ones but these are what we used.