MFL choices.

[morethanpotatoprints]

If you had a free choice of language, to be studied in depth, by your primary aged dc, which of these would you choose and why.

French, German, Spanish, Italian.

Spanish because it's more widely spoken

Spanish. It's supposed to be the easiest to learn because it is phonetic.

Free choice ... Difficult to provide, and I would have thought the tradition of teaching French in the UK will have a strong influence on what schools are able to offer.
However, I agree that Spanish is phonetic and some might like to look at these as a taster.
What is it?
My name is ..

Dd has just finished primary and dud Siamish, German & Spanish on a carousel.

She chose German for secondary (the school she was due to go to has the opti

Has the option of choosing for year. 7 because she got on with it best and there are lots of dance jobs I. Germany.

Unfortunately she's now going to a different school who only offer French.

a different school who only offer French

That is such a shame, but lack of teachers and resources in other languages is often the cause of this.

Spanish is much easier to learn than French or German, because its spelling is exceptionally simple.

Spanish because I found it fairly easy when I briefly did it at school and more widely spoken. Quite a few of the state primaries where I am in north London offer Spanish rather than French.

If I had a choice of those four and Mandarin, I know my OH would want the Mandarin for DC. There are a few state primaries around here offering Mandarin at least as an extra-curricular activity.

At the moment its sounding like Spanish is the most popular.
My dd is H.ed and has the offer of free lessons from a friend who is a retired HOD MFL. She is fluent in French but also does German and Spanish, hence not asking for other suggestions.
My dd would prefer Italian, but as not a nc subject it is costly to get resources and I wouldn't be able to teach, so it is French, German or Spanish.

Spanish for the reasons above. Also as it is one of the romantic languages, it will make it easier to speak French and Italian. German is a grammatically difficult language. I was brought up speaking German, but find Spanish and to a lesser extent, French much easier.

If you Home ed, this is a good resource: www.sunderlandschools.org/mfl-sunderland/

Wow Queen Thank you very much for the link. I have just had a brief look and its amazing and will help a lot to work along side her teacher.
Cheers.

I would actual look for a carousel as different languages teach you different building blocks. Research has shown that primary children do not learn a language, but the building blocks for learning a variety of languages. DD has been doing mandarin since year 1 and a carousel of French, Spanish and Italian.

Spanish because we often holiday in Mallorca.
Also it tends to be done only as an additional senior school or university language so DCs might like to pick it up again quickly.

No point in serious French or German unless the whole country does it, or they just start again at zero in Y7 and get bored.

Sorry should have read the OP properly for HE I think carousel idea is brilliant. If you are able to compare and contrast the way different languages do things that gives you a way better grounding than any state school I've come across.

Also many HE parents don't HE all the way through secondary and state schools are language provision is very scrappy and forever changing. DD1 got to give up German, DD2 has to carry on doing French and German and is furious. They can't make up their minds.

Most schools seem to be dropping German in favour of Spanish now. I was trying to find resources to help DS (4) learn German as we are moving there but you can't find any - it's all French and Spanish with a sprinkling of mandarin.

Star and Yoni

Very interesting posts, thank you. Yes, we aren't sure yet whether dd will enter secondary at some point and your point about secondary provision is interesting.
I hadn't considered a carousel as I thought she may get a bit confused, with the different languages. I can't see our friend wanting to stick solely to the nc if at all. I can also imagine her going quite in depth, more like they might do at secondary.
I'm beginning to see that Spanish has become popular, when my older dc were at school the emphasis seemed to be on German at secondary and French for primary

DD's school has a massive amount of research including following pupils from 3 to 18 ( the school is nursery to year 13) charting languages studied and eventual GCSE and A- level grades. The concluded that carousel works if Spanish is the first language, as it is easy to know masculine and feminine in Spanish you then know in French and Italian. Italian next as sentence structure is very regular and then French. In Spanish they concentrate on nouns and then more sentences in Italian. Their researched showed that it was much more beneficial to concentrate on building blocks in primary rather than in depth. They found that those who had building block technique had better GCSE and A-Level grades than those who had done in depth in primary.
To put their level of success in to context - approx. one third of the year 13 every year for last 5 years has gone to Oxford, Cambridge or Durham to study MFL.