The spelling test

I don't know whether giving my kids a spelling test on Spanish words is a good idea or not, but following my new plan to take into consideration how my kids say that they want to study that is exactly what I've done. As I mentioned in the previous post I made them a few flash cards the other day, and after having played with them for a couple of days both Christiania and Nicholas got a full score on their tests :-)

I will definitely make more flash cards, but I think I might try and plan better for the next batch. The thing I did after the flash cards was putting tags up all over the house naming different things. When we lived in England i 2005/2006 we let our house to an American family. When they moved out and we moved back in there were still Norwegian tags hanging all over the place :-) They had the Norwegian word on them and then under, in brackets, the pronunciation written phonetically in English. I don't feel the need to have a pronunciation guide on my Spanish tags because it's quite straight forward, and Norwegians only pronounce a few sounds different anyway, mainly 'o' and 'u', and once you've learnt that you're good to go.




The main challenge when making the tags are knowing which words are common in Spain and which are typical for Latin America. When I started out I was using the Pimsleur course, which to my knowledge was based on Mexican Spanish. I was fine with that because I'm not a huge fan of the Iberian lisp on the 'z' and some 'c's, but the more I read about Spanish the more I've come to appreciate that while there are few differences in general it might make more sense to try and learn the Iberian version as much as possible, as we live in Europe and will most likely only be able to practice what we've learnt visiting Spain. I don't think I've done too much damage so far. We do say 'jugo' instead of 'zumo' and 'banana' instead of 'plátano', though I have informed the kids that there are some differences, and we can always practice the Iberian words a little before going down there :) Now, back to the tags, I'll try not to keep ignoring Iberian Spanish when learning new words so I'm spending quite a lot of time trying to get the names of things right. Like 'living room'... Is it 'salón'? Sala de estar? Or simply 'sala'? And what is a bedroom? Habitación, dormitorio, quarto? For now I've gone with 'sala' and 'habitación' and I'm consoling myself with the fact that which ever word I choose the chances are we will be understood.