Learning Languages Through Translations

Reading through Harry Potter E La Camera Dei Segreti (Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone) gave me enough vocabulary to skip the first two semesters of Italian at Penn State and ace the intermediate-level course when I was a college student.  Similarly, Harry Potter Y El Prisionero de Azkaban replaced my first two semesters of college Spanish.


I should qualify that a bit--I speak French fluently, which makes other Romance languages relatively easy for me, and I'd had a few after-school Spanish tutoring sessions as an elementary-school student and listened to my parents' set of Italian-language records sometime during middle school or high school--but the principle holds true: reading English literature in translation and and classics in other languages that one has first read in English translation can be a cheap, enjoyable, and effective immersion experience.  It won't make you a fluent speaker of a language by itself, but it will expand your vocabulary and give you a feel for the grammar quickly and painlessly.


This obviously works best for languages that are related to English (or to whatever other languages you can speak or read).  With other languages a lot of tedious dictionary work will be needed, and that will be off-putting to all but the most patient and motivated language learners.


I also use literature in translation to help my children learn French and Spanish.  Many popular English-language picture books have been translated into these languages, and kids often find it easier to pick up vocabulary from a book whose story they already know than from an unfamiliar book.  My three-and-a-half year-old son will often bring me two versions of a story at bedtime and ask me to read them back-to-back.  Some even come with a CD, which may be particularly helpful to parents who don't know the target language or don't pronounce it well.


For very young children or those just beginning to learn a language, I recommend translations of Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown (illustrated by Clement Hurd) and Bill Martin Jr.'s books Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? (illustrated by Eric Carle).  Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar is available in French in many public libraries' foreign-language collections, although so far I haven't found a translation that I like; they tend to make the text long and awkward, destroying the charming simplicity of the original.


For somewhat older children, favorites include Ludwig Bemelmans's Madeline books (as good in French as in the original English) and Jean de Brunhoff's Babar stories (which were originally written in French and contain some more or less offensive references to French colonialism and scenes that may be frightening to some children--use with caution), and the original Curious George books by H. A. & Margret Rey.


My son particularly enjoyed Deborah Guarino's more recent book Is Your Mama a Llama (illustrated by Steven Kellogg) in a Spanish translation by Aida E. Marcuse; our library copy also came with a delightfully-narrated audio tape, which Sebastian listened to at bedtime and in the car for several weeks before we had to return it.


There are many other children's classics and recent bestsellers available in French, Spanish, and other languages.  There are also what I call "corporate" books that are terrible as literature but may be useful for the purpose of learning a new language; these include English and Spanish versions of the Dora the Explorer books, based on the wildly-popular TV show of the same name.


Teenagers and other more advanced students may enjoy reading The Adventures of Pinocchio in Carlo Collodi's original Italian, and the truly ambitious fantasy fan may even want to tackle J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books in Russian or in his/her choice of dozens of other languages.

A Short Linguistic Memoir

I took the city bus to school when I was growing up in Newfoundland.  We lived in a townhouse on Craigmillar Avenue, with its back facing the South Side Hills, and the school that I attended through the sixth grade was across town, up a steep hill from Downtown and St. John's Harbour.  My parents didn't own a car when I started kindergarten at Bishop Feild Elementary, so my mother and I were on the Route 1 Metrobus when I started feeling a bit nervous about going to school all in French.


I had spoken only English up to that point.  My paternal grandmother was a New Orleans French speaker, a "Creole," as she called herself, but she had not taught my father to speak.  My mother was a "bayman"--that is, it had been enough of a challenge for her, when she'd first arrived in St. John's as a student at Memorial University, to speak English that was standard enough to avoid embarrassment.  Growing up in the isolated fishing community of Nipper's Harbour, on the Baie Verte Peninsula, she had spoken an English reminiscent of the West Country dialects, with a good dose of Irish English thrown in for good measure.


My four-year-old fears soon dissolved when I met my kindergarten teacher, Janette Planchat, and started my first day in the Canadian French Immersion program.  I was soon speaking French, if not like a native, at least quite fluently.  We had all our classes (except gym and music) in French up until Grade 3, when an hour-a-day English class was introduced, and we gradually got more and more English until we were down to two classes (French and social studies) in French by the tenth grade.  I wish that the French Immersion curriculum had been even more rigorous than it was and that it had remained nearly all French through the high-school years, but despite its limitations, the program was one of the greatest gifts my parents ever gave me.


My parents also encouraged my linguistic abilities by teaching me phonics before I went to kindergarten, enrolling me in a Chinese Saturday school for several years during elementary school, and sending me to a German Saturday school in the seventh grade and a German night class (for adults) in the eighth grade.  They let me listen to their Italian records and attend after-school Spanish and German tutoring for a while, too.  Indirectly, too, they taught me to value cultures and languages by sponsoring a family from Vietnam who had immigrated to Canada and making friends from a variety of different cultures.  When I was a teenager, my father took the whole family to Turkey for a year, and two years later my mother went back to graduate school and became an ESL teacher at the college level.  At the same time, I transferred to an American high school, where I studied Latin and joined the International Students Club.


I can still speak French, although I'm rusty after more than a decade and a half of living in the United States, and as a bonus, I also find it much easier than most people do to learn other languages as an adult.  I taught myself Spanish and Italian (at the intermediate level) as a college student, and I have also learned  some Korean.  I am now focusing on mastering Chinese and know bits and pieces of various other languages, including Turkish, Greek, and Georgian.


When I started college at the University of Chicago, my father went through the course catalog with me, and I learned, for the first time, that there was a field of study called "Linguistics."  I took my first linguistics course--Languages of Europe--that fall, with Kostas Kazazis, who was a phenomenal teacher and a wonderful person.  Since then I have taken advanced coursework in linguistics at several different universities.  I am particularly interested in historical linguistics, typology, and language universals.


I have a Master's degree in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa and am currently earning a second Master's degree, in Library and Information Science, from Drexel University and running World's Edge Books & Publishing and its new imprint LinguistKids.  I plan to return to graduate school for my PhD in linguistics once I am able to read academic articles in Chinese.


I am also trying to pass on my love of languages and linguistics to my children.  I speak to them in French and Chinese as often as I can, read them books in those languages, take them to Saturday and evening classes, and use most of their TV-watching time to play French- and Chinese-language DVDs.


I would love to hear about other people's experiences, and I welcome suggestions for future blog posts.  If you are an author interested in submitting materials to World's Edge Books and Publishing / LinguistKids or a translator or illustrator interested in working on one of our projects, please email your cover letter and resume to worldsedgepublishing@gmail.com.

Acquiring Language Materials Through Your Local Public Library

You can acquire many of the materials that you need to teach your child a second/foreign language for free if you know how to use the services of your local public library.  If you live in a big city or other culturally-diverse area, your library may have an excellent collection of language books and audio-visual materials to check out.  but if, like mine, your library's foreign-language collection consists of a single shelf of mostly Spanish/English bilingual books, don't despair.  Instead, take advantage of interlibrary loan services.

The WorldCat website will allow you to locate items in the catalogs of libraries worldwide and will give you the distance from your home zip code to the nearest libraries owning a particular item.

With a local public-library card, you will be able to request items online through your state's library catalog and have them delivered to your home library.  Here are links to some state catalogs:

Alabama                                             Pennsylvania
California                                           South Dakota
Iowa                                                    Vermont
Maine

Book Review: Henry and the Kite Dragon

Book Review: Henry and the Kite Dragon. By Bruce Edward Hall. Illustrated by William Low. Philomel, 2004. 40 pages. Tr. $16.99 ISBN 0399237275; PLB $16.99 ISBN 978-0399237270.

Henry Chu and his friends, in New York City’s Chinatown, are enthralled by the beautiful pigeon-chasing kites that their neighbor Grandfather Chin teaches them to make. When some boys from neighboring Little Italy attack their spectacular dragon kite, the Chinese-American children decide that it’s time to stand up and fight. But they learn that their rivals’ destructive behavior is motivated by concern for the terrified pigeons, which turn out to be homing pigeons and the boys’ pets. The children, with Grandfather Chin’s help, work out a compromise to allow birds and kites to share the sky and Chinese and Italian children to share the nearby park.

Based on true events experienced by the Bruce Edward Hall’s father during the 1920s, the story is remarkable for its historical and cultural detail as well as its level of cross-cultural sensitivity. Children will be delighted by the depictions of the sights and sounds of Chinatown, the references to the traditions of kite flying and training homing pigeons, and even the emphasis on the sounds of the children’s names. William Low’s impressionistic paintings, with their rich paper texture, suggest the materials of the kites and enhance the straightforward text with their sensitive, realistic portrayal of children’s faces and clothing and colorful, sweeping depictions of kites and city streetscapes. Children of any cultural background will relate to this story about feeling different, about overcoming loss, about the limitations of adult wisdom, and about the transformational power of beauty and friendship. Recommended for children ages 4-8.