Parlez Vous Frustrated?

Paris, France, View of the Eiffel Tower
I think that foreign languages are such an important part of a child's education.

Maybe I am biased because I always enjoyed them growing up. I took 4 yrs of German and 2 yrs of French in high school and I went to Germany on a summer exchange program when I was 15. When I joined the Air Force, I became a Russian linguist. My husband was also a German, Russian, and Serbo-Croation linguist. I haven't used any of my language skills in the past 10 years and they are dwindling. This doesn't change the fact that I still love languages though.

So, when starting to homeschool my children, I decided that they definitely had to learn a language or two.

I didn't give Ellie a choice and told her that she would be starting Latin this year. She wasn't happy about this decision. We had tried Prima Latina with her a couple of years back and she did not like it. We both had a hard time with the woman's thick southern drawl. It might not bug other people, but I just couldn't get past hearing Latin with such a thick accent.

Fortunately, she LOVES the program that we chose: Latin for Children. The lessons are on DVD (thankfully!), the chants are catchy, and it comes with a workbook, activity book, and a primer to read. We're only on lesson 2, but she is actually really enjoying it. Hooray!!

Since I made her do Latin, I told her that she could decide what foreign language she wanted to learn.

I tried my hardest to steer her towards Russian or German.

Try as I might, it didn't work. She chose French. I don't like French much - they leave off half of the word when pronouncing it! I let her have her way though, because I wanted her to love learning it.

Outcome: She is MISERABLE learning French.
We chose to use Breaking the French Barrier and she is struggling with it. She did fine for the first ten "steps" before the actual lessons started. They included colors, numbers, telling time, weather, and other basic stuff like that.

When the lessons started and it jumped right into conjugating verbs she wanted to cry. I feel like the exercises ask questions that she doesn't know how to answer (ie. vocab that she hasn't learned yet).

There have also been a few questions that I just can't fathom why they put into a children's workbook - (ie. At what time does Desperate Housewives start? and some other questions that she couldn't answer unless she knew information about actors/movies. She didn't know who/what Meryl Streep was and didn't know that she was in The Devil Wears Prada). Pop-culture should not be a requirement to learn French and the whole Desperate Housewives thing is totally inappropriate in my opinion.

So, she has now agreed to switch to German or Russian. (Of course this is AFTER I have spent money on this French program and some great French readers with CDs). I am at a loss for what to do. I would love to do Russian, but I am afraid that it will be super hard since it uses a different alphabet - and there isn't a lot of material available for children learning Russian. Looks like it might be German :)

Decisions, decisions....