The No-Television Experiment, Day 28

I have a hard time getting rid of books.  Actually, I have a hard time not acquiring new books constantly.  I first realized this when I was berated by my father (who has a substantial home library himself) for "collecting books" at the age of sixteen because I wanted to buy a Romanian-English dictionary from a used bookstore during a trip to India that I took with him.

For the last few years I have had to serious control my book-acquiring obsession because our apartment isn't big enough to hold any more (our self-storage unit is nearly full, too).  Now, four weeks into our No-Television Experiment, I have realized the need to be even more careful about what I acquire--and to pare down our current collection--for another reason: indiscriminate collecting is not conducive to our educational aims.  

I've recently begun to dread our visits to the local public library because I know that when Sebastian and Serena walk in through the door of the children's department they are going to be surrounded with wonderful books--nearly all in English!  I estimate that close to 99% of our library's children's collection is in English, even though about 20% of Lewiston's population is French-speaking and at least 10% speaks other languages, including a large number of Somali immigrants.  When the children are not with me, I go straight to the one mostly-French bookcase and make the majority of my selections from there.  But the children, of course, do not limit themselves to one tiny corner of the room, and they come out with twenty-nine English-language books and perhaps one or two French titles (there are only a couple of Chinese-language titles in the entire children's department) each time.

Our home library is somewhat better, with about 80% English-language titles, but I'd like to make the proportions even more balanced--about 40% English, 40% French, and 20% Chinese for now (a larger proportion of Chinese later, I hope, once I'm better able to handle Chinese characters).  This is not easy to achieve when everything that we see in local stores and at summer garage sales and library sales is in English. I have to work hard to find our French and Chinese books online, while the English ones seem to appear out of nowhere, taking up all my precious space (and my children's reading time) whenever I let my guard down.

A few days ago I did some serious weeding of English books from the kids' bookshelves.  I'm beginning to resign myself to the fact that life is too short to read every book ever printed, and although I don't censor my children's reading material (I even read a completely meaningless "Transformers" book to Sebastian once, just because he wanted to read it) I have to be selective about what I keep in the house if I want them to have time to read the best books available in Chinese, French, and English.  So I went through the children's bookshelves and donated everything in English that was badly written or illustrated, that the kids didn't like, that I didn't like (unless the kids really loved it), that was commercially written or illustrated, that we had a duplicate (in better condition) of, or that was significantly damaged (unless irreplaceable).  I brought several large boxes of books to the Salvation Army store down the road, and now we have some half-empty shelves just waiting to be filled up with French and Chinese books.  The children have discovered some treasures (in all three languages) that were previously buried under all the junk, too.

My father will be bringing some new French additions to our collection with him when he comes to Maine next month--books that I ordered from Amazon.ca and had shipped to my sister Margaret in Toronto (free Super-Saver Shipping within Canada!) and that she brought to Pennsylvania with her when she went to visit Dad and my sister Darby there.  In the meantime, I am still looking for high-quality French picture books and simple Chinese picture books and would love to hear any recommendations!

Review of Gordon & Li Li Learn Animals in Mandarin

Gordon & Li Li Learn Animals in Mandarin, by Michele Wong McSween, illustrated by Nam Doan.  McWong Ink, 2010.   $9.99  ISBN 978-0-9820881-2-8

Michele Wong McSween's bright and colorful "Gordon & Li Li" board books are simple enough to be enjoyed by the youngest babies but will also hold the attention of active preschoolers.  

The first book, Gordon & Li Li: Words for Everyday, was illustrated by Kevin Murawski, who has also done some "Harold and the Purple Crayon" board-book spinoffs.  In that book McSween introduced Gordon & Li Li, blue and pink panda cousins who live in Brooklyn, New York, and Beijing, China, respectively.  Each page featured a simple, straightforward drawing of one or both pandas posing with an everyday object.  The English word was printed at the top of the page and the Chinese word in pinyin transcription at the bottom.  The words chosen ranged from "ball" to "bath" to "apple" to "shoes" to "cell phone," and a couple of phrases--"Good job!" and "See you next time!" were introduced at the end of the book.  Altogether, 26 words and phrases were included, which seems to be a perfect number to fit the attention span of a busy toddler and to allow both child and parents to remember everything with repeated readings. 

McSween's brand-new sequel, Gordon & Li Li Learn Animals in Mandarin, released on March 1 of this year, is even more charming and better conceptualized than the first book.  The new illustrator, Nam Doan, has added an element of humor to the pictures that leaves my nearly-four-year-old son rolling in the aisles time after time.  Instead of merely posing smilingly in each illustration, Gordon & Li Li are active and have more personality in this book.  Li Li squats on a lily pad with the frog, charms the snake, and waddles with the chicken, while Gordon leads a family of ducklings on a walk, sunbathes with an alligator, and chews a blade of grass with a cow.  

The text, still limited to one word per page, is also more useful to Chinese-language learners in this new book.  As well as the English and pinyin versions of each word, the author has included simplified characters (the words range from one to three characters each) and an English-based phonetic transcription of the Mandarin pronunciation.  For someone like me who is trying to learn Chinese characters and teach them to my children, I was very grateful to have both the pinyin and characters for each word.  The English phonetic transcription is not necessary for my purposes, but they may be helpful to readers who are not familiar with the conventions of pinyin, including even some native speakers of Chinese dialects, such as my husband, who does not remember how to read characters and never learned pinyin as a child.

Young children will be charmed by the bold, bright colors and amusing images of this book and will ask to read it again and again.  It is simple enough that, after a few readings, they will be able to start supplying the Chinese words themselves and to feel a sense of pride at having learned some real Chinese, which will motivate them to learn more and to develop their tolerance for longer, more complicated Chinese-language or bilingual books.  Recommended for ages 0-6.