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Anyone here tried any homeschooling DVD's or lessons on learning diffrent languages?  I'm mainly gearing this toward my 10 year old, figured he might as well start picking up some dutch since he was born there.

http://www.languagequest.com/index.php  has most of the languages we want to learn, but mostly for computers.

http://www.rosettastone.com/en  has quite a bit of homeschool and software.

This stuff isn't cheap, guess I'll have to spring for 1 language at a time.

Eventually I would like for him and I to at least know:
English (whoot~~well okay so it is hillbilly English)
Dutch
German
Spanish (I hopefully can get this wrote off at work--of course the more Latin American based)
French (not sure, but more the Quebec style)
Portuguese (Brazilian Based)

Thanks!

Chinese. Language of the future.

Oh, Rosetta Stone. yea, pretty much the standard.

I once picked up some French (not "Quebecian"  :-P) through Rosetta Stone fairly quickly (with some aid from other sources as well). Enough to read through newspapers, websites, labels, and that sort of thing. It didn't take long for me to start doing that either. I never made any real use out of it though, so I'd need to do some refreshing.

Not sure if the same would apply to languages that don't use the Roman alphabet though. If I can recall correctly, Rosetta starts presenting the reading part to you fairly early. It's not a bad thing with French or Spanish, but for something that uses Cyrillic or some kind of Brahmic script, I'd imagine that the written form could be too abstract and too daunting for a new learner (in my uneducated/uninformed opinion -- I never actually tried this).

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Has anyone here actually learned to speak Chinese or read Kanji with this stuff? Maybe I'm just too lazy.

I'm currently half way through 'Mandarin Level II' at my local continuing ed. offering. If you're going to learn a chinese dialect, Mandarin is the one you should do (Cantonese is what a lot of North American chinese speak - Hong Kong is in Canton) and I can say from personal experience that learning a tonal language from a DVD/CD is REALLY EFFIN HARD. Dutch? No idea. But if you're doing chinese take a course with a native.

I have tried to learn Japanese using other materials.  Hard.  I can only imagine any Chinese would be even more difficult.

I've had good luck with the Pimsleur Program.  It really doesn't have any reading comprehension but I found I picked up the vocabulary and pronunciation fairly quickly.  It's somewhat expensive, but well worth it.

I got mine here (http://www.lingoshop.com).

Oh, I liked the Pimsleur stuff.  Great, but it seems more geared to the guy who has to go on a business trip to _____ in a few weeks.  Besides the CDs not teaching me to read, it was a good system.