DD has recently started secondary school and had to pick two languages from a choice of four - French, German, Spanish and Latin.
She is quite severely dyslexic and very high IQ - can now read reasonably well but spelling is a nightmare. She uses a laptop for everything which has massively improved things, and new school are very supportive of SEN, but MFL seems to be a step too far.
I did German, French and Latin at school myself, did a couple of years of Spanish and I'm bilingual in Italian and English, so helping her at home is definitely possible.
We opted for Latin and Spanish as the best choices for a dyslexic, and I think we'll be okay with the Latin, but the Spanish is just a nightmare.
She struggles to turn English sounds into the correct letter groups - and Spanish, with its different sounds, may as well be Martian.
School set an aural listening and spelling test as homework and she would have got 0/10. Unfortunately her solution - having got the first 3 wrong - was to use the translation school had supplied to google and then copy and paste the correct answer so she looks as if she got 7/10.
DD has huge perfectionist tendencies and likes to do well, so we now have tears and trauma and she's convinced she's just stupid and useless.
She did French at primary for 6 years and learnt so little that I advised her not to take it at secondary. I can't see that German would be any easier than Spanish and the grammar is more complicated. The Latin is fine as it's phonetic and it's taught very differently from modern languages.
I don't know whether to suggest that she just slog along failing utterly and feeling miserable until school raise it with me, or if I should contact them and say this is going to be a huge disaster and potentially damage her confidence and could she just stop now. (GCSE years there is an option to take classes to help with learning editing skills and dyslexia strategies in place of MFL so the school obviously realise that certain kids are just never going to get their heads round a second language).
Unfortunately Covid has made discussion with school a lot harder as nothing is working quite the right way - I can't pop in and see anyone, and they want to keep the children in their bubbles.
I'm generally keen on 'giving things a good shot' and she has only been there 3 weeks, but we have also had to work incredibly hard on building her confidence with academics and I would rather drop a subject rather than find she is miserable and calling herself stupid again.
Any advice?