Reasonable Time Commitment?

[Ellsinore]

My son is a tenth grader with no previous experience in foreign language study. He wanted to do this by himself, but left to his own devices on Chapter 1 for the past three weeks, he's obviously lost and confused -- and still won't admit it.

I had intended to work with him on this, and do the next LatinStudy group anyway, so I've spent the past few days working on Chapter 1 myself, and I'm confident that we'll be able to get this figured out.

My question is this: What is a reasonable amount of time to devote to each step? We're using the list in the FAQ (http://www.quasillum.com/latin/faq/whfaq.1.php#0) as a guide.

I realize the big picture is "as long as it takes" but I need to be able to plan our days a little better than that -- the goal being to finish the first twenty chapters in one school year. I don't want to set aside an hour a day only to find we really needed (and should have planned on) two -- and he's even further behind.

I hope this makes sense and that there might be some high school teachers here who can tell me what kind of time commitment they expect from their students to complete the first year successfully.

Thanks!

ETA: I probably should have added that we're also using English Grammar for Students of Latin which should help immensely.

[Scribo]

Salve,

I'm a newbie so please keep this in mind. I think the book itself mentions that a chapter should take 3-5 days, which seems like a good time frame. You can work over the grammar and internalise the vocab and have a go at alittle writing yourself.

It depends on the chapter though. Sometimes I finish something easily, do the tests at the back etc and get it all right, and get so excited I have to do another in the same day..

good luck. ^^

[Essorant]

What specifically are you having difficulty with? If you or he may write down some questions in respect to the things discussed in Chapter 1, we would be glad to help.

[Ellsinore]

Well, as far as I know, I'm doing okay -- if I'm having a problem so far, I don't know it yet.

My son's problems? Well -- I'm finding out tonight he just didn't study, drill, or bother with things he didn't understand, assuming they'd be clear as time progressed.

I had a little "conference" with him tonight and asked him how he thought it was going. "Great! No problem!"

"Well, I'm glad to hear that! What's a macron?"

<crickets>

The last three weeks haven't been a total loss, though -- apparently he knows what a verb is.

I'm joking, of course -- he has made some progress, but it looks like he thought this was going to be pretty easy.

So to answer your question: If he has a specific problem, it's that he didn't think he needed to bother with things like flashcards and memory work. He read the chapter, understood about half of it, and it was on to the exercises, without really a clue as to what the chapter was about, or what he needed to do to really *study* it.

So we'll just start over on Monday.