Teacher Professor

How would I go about learning Spanish or German?

I'm homeschooled, 15, and my first Language is sadly English. I've taught myself a bit of German and some Spanish. It's hard to teach myself all my school lessons and a language to myself...so I would like to learn in a classroom with other kids or something! My parents will not let me go to school, and I've asked multiple times.

Public Comments

1. I'm sure it's not easy to learn a language by yourself, but if your parents won't let you go to school, there's nothing you can change. Did you ask them for a teacher at home? It could be someone of your age that's studying german or spanish in school, you could study together. If that's not possible, did you try with CD's?
2. thats very sad, that ur parents do that to you because a bilingual person is worth double. but i would suggest for you to learn by cds or videos online. look 4 videos on youtube, learning by ur self makes it aweful difficult. learn spanish first, than it will be easier to learn german. good luck nd work hard to achieve ur goals
3. Nothing wrong with your 1st language being english. Mine happens to be french. It is great you're open minded towards wanting to learn other languages. Have you thought of chatrooms? el chat dot com (no spaces) is pretty good for spanish but I don't know any in german.
4. I started taking German in high school, 5 years ago, and speak German fluently with a pretty decent (if not really southern) accent. Ok, yes, I did spend 6 months on an exchange trip in Germany, but my German is still better than most other Americans that I know with similar experience, according to my old German teacher and now my German professor in Uni. What input do I have? Well, before I was fluent and before I could actually really speak and comprehend decently, I was already listening to radio in German, and watching whatever films I could find in German and following along with subtitles. Yes, part of learning a language is learning all the words, the grammar and how to put sentences together, but that's a bit easier, IMO when you can put that into practice, say trying to understand a radio show or a scene in a film. And listening to dialogue also helps with your word order and articles, because a lot of the rules are pretty much just memorisation and repetition. Watching films in German and following along in German subtitles (and looking up words you don't know) is a decent start, and once you're a bit confident, you can move on to listening to radio online, or watching non-subtitled films. Reading various things in German also helps, like news, blogs, magazines. Anyways, if this sounds good, here's a few things to get you started on: Films: -Downfall (Der Untergang), is a pretty intense war and historical flick with great actors and tells the last days of WW2 from the German perspective. I've found this film at my local Hollywood video, with subtitles. -Goodbye Lenin, is a good, normal film that is a bit easier to digest than Downfall. It tells the story of people dealing with the fall of the Berlin Wall. I've also found this at my local video store. -The Lives of Others, (Das Leben der Anderen) is a bit darker, but not as intense as Downfall, and tells about life in the DDR (East Germany) and the big-brother government. I'm sure some videos stores are going to have this, and its also relatively cheap at Amazon. -Inglourious Basterds- I probably shouldn't be recommending a Taratino-film to a 15-year-old, and even though I really didn't like the film all that much, its does have some pretty decent German dialogue, by native speakers and might be just the thing if you're into Taratino's films. For radio and other audio things, there are few things I'd like to add: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/0,,2547,00.html, Deutsche Welle has some free self-study things and various audio clips which might be good. Heres a few of the internet-radio stations that I listen to, and they're actually all real actual stations in Germany, just online: http://www.swr3.de SWR3 http://www.swr1.de http://www.meinantenne1.de/hra1/f http://www.einslive.de/ And you can also look up some German bands, and here are a few that I like: Ich + Ich Die Toten Hosen Wir sind Helden Nena Falco Tom Schilling Silbermond Anyhow, one thing I'd like to add is that it all really depends on how much effort put into it, but having the right environment also helps alot. Some of your options are looking up summer courses, and maybe seeing if your local community college offers intro German courses, maybe your parents will let you take a language course over the summer. And while it doesn't seem like your parents are really open to going to school, but the really best way to improve your language skills is to do an exchange and be forced to listen and speak everyday. Perhaps your parents might let you do an exchange? (There are one-way exchanges, if you can't host.) Heres an example of a summer camp/course: http://www.millersville.edu/forlang/hscamps.php And heres the rest of the list from the Goethe-Institut: http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/lp/lrn/kur/sus/enindex.htm Hope this help!