I want to stay as consistent as possible with my daily blog posts. Since today was a busy day, this will be a short post.
As I just mentioned, I’m working on an accelerated learning program for Spanish and French.
I spent most of today working on that curriculum and the associated teaching methods. Step 1 is to see if I can reliably get students to a conversational level within 6 months by spending 4 hours toward language learning a week. Here’s the 5-step plan as of now:
Step 1: Train the ears
Make sure students listen more than read or write. Ears need to be trained first.
Step 2: Teach ~500 high-frequency words while doing ear training
For now, I plan to use Quizlet. Take a look at what I’ve made so far here. I think approximately 500 words will be able to get people through most simple conversations. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s my theory as of now.
Step 3: Teach essential grammar
I’ve been building a 3-hour grammar crash course based loosely on Tim Ferriss’ method of grammar deconstruction. My idea is to combine the most important conjugations into Quizlet - more on this another day.
Step 4: Input, input, input…output, output, output
I’d like to use class time to do lots of listening and conversation to get students used to, from day one, interacting with people in Spanish.
Thanks for reading today’s post. If you have a low-beginner level in Spanish or French and want to be a part of my accelerated learning program, let me know. Spanish is much more developed than French at the moment.