Doubling up on foreign language in HS.

mathinokc
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:40:45 +0000

My daughter took AP French and pre-AP Spanish III as a freshman.
She took AP Spanish Langauge as a sophomore.
She’s in a new school now for her junior & senior years and they don’t offer French or Spanish above the level she’s already taken. So, she’s starting over in German I.

From our experience, we do see a lot of cross-over between French and Spanish. The pronunciation is very different, but she’ll already have the concepts of verb conjugation and noun/adjective gender and there are lots of Spanish/French cognates. There are several things that are known “gotchas” for people who are studying both languages (I think when to use the subjunctive is one of them.). I don’t know what is covered in French I or II or how many levels your school offers (we’re used to a system where year 4 is the AP year); I would think it would be hard to skip 2 years of language and that one would be more doable.

Your daughter could document her ability in Spanish through the AP exam and/or the SAT Subject test; she won’t be able to take the IB exam unless she takes the IB Spanish class.

There was a recent “Ask the Dean” question here on CC where the dean said they like to see students get to the point with a language where they’re studying literature in the language.