Which language(s) should I take?

[dfrecore]

Many stores today have signs in both English and Spanish so you can practice while you shop!

I used to do a lot of shopping in a Hispanic grocery store. Everything was in Spanish (including the store announcements) and English was secondary, but the clerks were bilingual. So I probably know a lot of food items, if nothing else.   

All I really remember from my actual Spanish classes is "saca un papel", which is probably not the most useful sentence out there. 

Useful terms:

Una mas cerveza por favor. Una mas margarita por favor.  ?Donde esta' el bano?  I think that's pretty much all you need! LOL

[rachel83az]

I have taken the German RPT and achieved a Superior rating.

Given my experience, you will find the test extremely challenging unless you have perfect (college-level) reading fluency. I would say the test is strongly predictive of actual ability.

The RPT is supposed to be "adaptive", which is something I want to test. Since you scored Superior, your experiences are going to be different from someone who has less knowledge of a language. My aim would be to see just how "bad" one can be at a language and still get the minimum of 3 credits.

Decide on a language that suits you most, I would recommend working on a language you want most and then ladder that to a second language, for a language you may want to take your time learning it and not by rushing it.  I think if you have the energy, time to study a language (like 500 hours vs a college course of 100 hours, or even a course from the ACE providers) your language of choice would be much better.  For harder languages, you'll need to spend upwards of 700/750 hours to be as advanced or as fluent as possible...

I've already done that with German and Italian. I like them. But it seems to me like the average UMPI student here has no, or almost no, interest in a second language. For a third language for myself, I currently don't have a huge interest in any of the other RPT languages. Spanish might be the most useful, for a Titulo Proprio, but I otherwise don't really care that much. None of them are too useful for my current situation. 

I just completed Spanish with Sophia for UMPI. I've always wanted to learn Italian but I was unable to find a quick course that would give me the credit for UMPI. So, I vote Italian

So that's one vote for Italian!  

[Zardoz]

[quote pid='372626' dateline='1658732193']
My aim would be to see just how "bad" one can be at a language and still get the minimum of 3 credits.
[/quote]

You would still have to score in the Advanced Low to Mid range to get 3 credits. Whatever that means. But I'm guessing it's not going to be that easy.


An Intermediate High score will only yield 2 credits, which might as well be as good as nothing since you need 3 credits to fill the slot. 


So Intermediate High would only work if you can plug the gap with a different ACTFL test, such as the LPT.

I don't know what UMPI would say in a situation where you had 2 credits in language A and 2 credits in language B, so the best strategy IMHO would be to collect at least 3 credits for the same language.

[rachel83az]

So far the poll says German, Italian, and Spanish. Fair enough. Unless someone has a good reason to attempt one of the other languages, it'll be Spanish + Italian and/or German. 

Based on Duolingo's "studies", I should aim to complete 5-7 units of Duolingo by February of next year, or roughly one unit per month. I plan to use the Waterfall method for study, or try to, at least.

For Duolingo Spanish, the whole course is 10 units long. If I counted correctly:

• Unit 1 has 9 skills
  
• Unit 2 has 29 skills
  
• Unit 3 has 32 skills
  
• Unit 4 has 29 skills
  
• Unit 5 has 29 skills
  
• Unit 6 has 29 skills
  
• Unit 7 has 28 skills
  

Total: 185 skills. 185 skills x 5 crowns per skill = 925 crowns needed to complete Unit 7. 785 crowns to finish Unit 6. If I do an average of 4 crowns per day, that puts me at 860 crowns by February 25th (215 days from today). I'll probably try to do lessons to 2 crowns, then attempt to test out of the rest. There are only so many times I can put up with "Soy un hombre." before I go bonkers.

Poca a Poco has about 210 to 223 readable pages (once you remove the vocabulary or grammar bits), which means reading about a page a day of that. 

I have other resources, including this language-learning Humble Bundle, but I'm going to resist using them as much as possible. I'm going to assume that future UMPI students are going to want to get credit as quickly and as cheaply as possible, so they're not going to want to purchase books or apps I already have, such as Spanish for Dummies, or Babbel. 

I will be using some free stuff, though, like Leo's Spanish/English dictionary and I might use this Anki flashcard deck. I'll also be using the free version of Kwiziq on an irregular basis to gauge my progress. Right now, it says I am at 11.19% of A0, 0.38% of A1, and at a hilarious -0.07% for A2. Yes, negative! Too much anti-Spanish creeping in from Italian, perhaps. 

I don't usually restrict myself to so few books/apps, so this should be interesting. If I do use anything else, I'll let everyone know.

[rachel83az]

According to this ACTFL PDF, Advanced Low/Advanced Mid corresponds to high B1/B2 for the RPT: https://www.actfl.org/sites/default/file...sments.pdf We'll see how that actually fares.