Our First Chinese-Language Book Published

World's Edge Books & Publishing has just released its first Chinese book: Lina Mao Dickson's translation of our children's book I Drink Mommy's Milk: A Book About Mammals.  I am happy to announce that the book is now in our inventory and available for ordering through our website.  Please note that this is the Chinese-character-only edition; a bilingual edition with characters, pinyin, and English translation will be available in November 2010.

Chinese Edition of Breastfeeding Book to be Released

The Chinese-language edition of my book I Drink Mommy's Milk: A Book About Mammals is scheduled for release from World's Edge Books & Publishing later this month.  A bilingual (Chinese/English) edition is scheduled for release in early October.  The Chinese and bilingual editions, as well as the English edition, will be available through Amazon.com as well as through our website.

Back To School and a New Experiment

Sebastian went back to preschool yesterday and will be out of the house (and speaking only English) three full days and two half days a week until December.  Our No-Television Experiment is officially over.  So where do we go from here?  I have certainly learned that hyperactive and obnoxious popular English-language films like Toy Story and Madagascar add nothing of importance to my children's lives.  I have also learned that simply speaking to the children more and reading to them more in French and Chinese will improve my children's ability to use those languages infinitely more than buying them dozens of instructional DVDs.

I considered throwing the television set out, but in the end I decided against that; it seemed arbitrarily extreme to prevent myself from ever watching a set of lectures or a mystery on VHS, which I occasionally do.  And I would even like to let the children watch a strictly limited amount of TV--certainly not the standard English shows and not even language-learning programs that have explanations in English, but a small number of shows created for French- or Chinese-speaking children.  I have yet to find a good program in Chinese, due to my own inability to read websites in Chinese, but French-language children's shows such as the original and somewhat eccentric Passe-Partout (produced in Quebec) and the French editions of Caillou have a level of French that is just slightly above Sebastian's current comprehension level and so might help to reinforce and expand upon what he is learning with me (they are good for me, too, since they use vocabulary that I need with the kids every day).  I have decided to let the children watch two episodes (one hour) of one of these shows no more than twice a week.  Most of the other series and films at this level are on DVDs that can only be played in Europe, so I don't think I'll be tempted to go overboard with this.

And now I embark on a new journey: it is finally time to start speaking to the kids exclusively in French and Chinese when their father is at work.  Since Sebastian now has so many school hours in English, I realize that I am going to have to be more disciplined if I am going to make him truly multilingual.  And the hours when he's at school and Steve's at work will give Serena and Kai thirty hours a week of exposure to French and Chinese without any English interruptions.

I will continue to speak to them in French at least half the time when Steve is at home and to try to read mostly French (and Chinese) books to them, although I also want to encourage Sebastian's newfound interest in novels (in English) such as Stuart Little and Winnie the Pooh.  Next on his list are Misty of Chincoteague and Abel's Island, which I will read to him during our non-exclusive hours, when Daddy is home.

I have been doing most of my own reading in French, and that has been making it much easier for me to speak to the children in French.  I have found myself thinking in French part of the time, for the first time in ten or fifteen years.  In addition to a book to refresh my grammar and a book to perfect my pronunciation, I am re-reading Peter Mayle's Provence books in French translation.  I have just ordered a copy of A Wrinkle in Time (Un raccourci dans le temps) in French translation, as well as a complete set of the Spiderwick Chronicles (Les chroniques de Spiderwick), which will be fun for me to read and will also be good for the kids when they're older.

My father has just given me his enormous, multi-volume 19th-century Larousse dictionary along with an antique cabinet to keep it in, and I can't wait to get it out of storage and start using it; my thick desk-sized English/French-French/English Larousse is not sufficient anymore, and I haven't been very happy with the comprehensiveness of any of the online dictionaries that I've found so far.

The children's French has improved dramatically in the last six weeks, but their Chinese has not improved much; I am still looking for ways to improve my own Chinese so that I can speak to them in Chinese more often.  My Chinese translator Lina Mao Dickson has completed the Mandarin translation of my little book I Drink Mommy's Milk: A Book About Mammals, and we hope to have that out in Chinese-only and bilingual editions before the end of the month.  She is also working on Book I of our book-and-CD series Chinese Language for Parents and Children, which should be out later this fall.

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!

The No-Television Experiment, Day 7

Sebastian (age 4) and Serena (age 2) are having their supper at the picnic table in the backyard; they've been playing outside for hours, ever since we got home from running errands this afternoon.  Kai (7 months) is sitting on the living-room floor, playing happily by himself with a crow sounder.  The only other sound is the whirring of the fans in the living room and the kitchen.  Have I missed the television during our first TV-free week?  Not a bit.  Have the kids missed it?  Not much, as far as I can tell.

Sebastian has asked to watch TV perhaps four times during the week but without much conviction.  There hasn't even been a single "pleeeease?" when I've said no.  I didn't think it would be that easy; Sebastian is a persistent and goal-oriented kid, normally, and doesn't give up easily when he wants something--which makes me think that he doesn't really want to watch TV so much after all.

So what has he been doing instead, all week?  Well, we've been getting out of the house a lot more than usual.  Sebastian and Serena have been seeking entertainment in the backyard when they get bored with whatever they've been doing in the house, and even I've been getting out for more exercise and fresh air; when the kids start to get whiny, I'm more likely to get them all out for a walk than I was when I could count on the TV to keep them mesmerized for an hour or so before suppertime, naptime, bathtime, or storytime.

The kids have been more creative indoors, too: drawing and painting much more than usual (is it a coincidence that their drawings have suddenly gotten much more sophisticated in the last six days?), building, and inventing elaborate games of "house."  Sebastian's laziness has practically disappeared.  He's only once complained that it's too hot out, and he's been hiking happily for an hour or more at a time.  He always wants to go out when I ask him.  He even cleans up after himself with significantly less grumbling, and he doesn't get angry or grouchy as easily as he used to.  Is it my imagination, or has he actually become happier in such a short period of time?  Can television viewing really have such a strong effect on a person's whole life?

Both Sebastian and Serena have, as I'd hoped, started requesting stories during the day--reading is not just for bedtime any longer.  This has been especially beneficial for Serena, since she gets tired early in the evenings.  In the last week, she has read about three times as many stories as she did in the week before (Sebastian has read about twice as many)!  What makes me even happier is that they're both sitting through longer books and more books in French and Chinese.

As a bonus, I've somehow been getting them to bed noticeably earlier every night since we shut the TV set off.  It's easier to get them settled away for the night when you don't have to wait for a show to be over before you serve supper or put them in the bathtub, when they've already read plenty of stories during the day, and when they're actually tired because they've gotten plenty of exercise.

My concern that keeping the TV off would be bad for the children's Chinese seems to have been unfounded, too.  I no longer have to wait for the current show to be over in order to talk to them, and their brains are not filled with silly one-liners from their favorite programs.  I've noticed that we've actually been talking to each other more in French and Chinese and reciting more French and Chinese nursery rhymes and songs during the day.

My days haven't become any harder without the electronic babysitter.  Although I've been forced to pay more attention to the children, my interactions with them have been less stressful, so my energy levels have increased a bit, and, besides, I can think better without the constant chatter in the background.

I hope I continue to see improvements as the no-television experiment continues.  In the meantime, I am already fantasizing about throwing the TV set away forever (or at least locking it in a room where it can only be watched a couple of hours a week).  I haven't taken it out of the living room yet--mostly because it's too heavy for me to lift by myself--but I've been greedily eyeing the corner that it occupies, thinking about all the extra space I'd have if it were gone.

The No-Television Experiment, Day I

Sebastian, our four-year-old, has been gradually sneaking in more and more TV time every day since preschool let out for the summer in May, and to make matters worse, he's less interested than before in the educational (mostly French and Chinese) DVDs that I went through so much trouble to find for him and more interested in the loud and sarcastic Disney movies that we had planned to let him watch only once.  

At the same time (coincidence, or cause and effect?), he has become less and less inclined to exert himself: he's "too tired" to put away his toys after he plays with them, it's "too hot" to play in the backyard, and he needs to be carried because riding his bicycle is "too hard."  He wanders around the house repeating obnoxious phrases from the films such as, "You're biting my butt!" (Madagascar) to himself--and sometimes to me.  This morning, for the first time in his life, he didn't want to go out for a walk when I invited him--preferring, he explained, to stay home and watch TV.  

We went for the walk, and the television is now officially off until school starts up again after Labor Day.  Who knows?  It might even stay off longer than that--I might put it in storage or in our bedroom and bring out my grandfather's old electric organ to occupy the place of honor in the living room--but a month and a half should be long enough to show whether no TV will make a positive difference in my children's lives and behavior.

I grew up without a television set in the house until I was eleven years old, and when my parents did break down and buy one, they put it in their bedroom, where we were allowed to sit and watch it for an hour a day.  Most of the time my choice of program was Square One TV on PBS.  

Because of that lack of early exposure, I have never had much patience for television.  I have no tolerance at all for commercials and the other mindless chitchat and sensationalization that seems to occupy most of the time slots on most television channels, so I'm glad my husband hasn't insisted on getting cable.  

We do have a DVD player and a VHS player because Steve didn't want to do away with the television completely when Sebastian was born four years ago (he now watches "television" only on his computer--the news and a couple of sci-fi shows, which he downloads from the networks' websites).  As soon as Sebastian figured out what they could do--when he was less than a year old--it became a constant struggle for me to keep the set turned off most of the day.

Until this spring he watched the French and Chinese and other educational videos that I chose for him almost exclusively, but then I let him watch Stuart Little and 101 Dalmatians in French, thinking that it would be good for his French to hear more complex conversations than he had heard before.  When Steve saw that, he got him the English versions of those two movies, and then we let him watch a couple of classic Disney videos that someone had given us for free at a garage sale.  When he couldn't stand to watch those one more time, Steve got him some of the more recent animated blockbusters--Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Madagascar--and it all went downhill from there.  These films are cute enough in some ways, but I also find them loud, hyperactive, and sarcastic, as well as chock-full of gratuitous violence passing itself off as comedy (or even normality).  And of course they are all in English; every hour he spends watching them is an hour that he is not getting any exposure to French or Chinese.  I am not going to miss them much.

My one concern is that I won't be able to keep up the kids' Chinese without TV.  Since my own Chinese is very limited, I've been relying to a large extent on educational shows to teach Sebastian and Serena Chinese vocabulary and to help keep the words and phrases fresh in my own mind.  Will they end up with less exposure to Chinese over the next month and a half, or will the lack of TV time as good for their Chinese-language skills as I suspect it will be for some other aspects of their lives?  Will we, perhaps, finally get around to reading those Chinese books we have lying around, and will we find more time to actually speak with each other in Chinese?

Although he has always loved reading, Sebastian only wants to sit through stories in the evenings after supper, and I'm hoping that will change.  I want to introduce him to longer books with fewer pictures such as Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan and to substitute audiobooks for some of his former TV time.  Since last fall he has enjoyed listening to some of his favorite stories--Curious George, Madeline, The Polar Express--on tape when he goes to bed, and for the last few days we have already been listening to Winnie the Pooh on CD in the car and Little Bear on tape at home.  

It may be harder for me to find appropriate audiobooks for him in French and Chinese, since his comprehension level in both languages--and especially in Chinese--is much lower than in English.  I might have to get creative and make my own recordings for him to listen to at night and when I'm busy doing laundry or cooking supper.  That could even become a project for the whole family.

I will try to make posts on the progress of the No-Television Experiment at least once a week until school starts in September.  I'm sure there will be plenty to report!

Review of Play & Learn Chinese with Mei Mei 1

Review of Play & Learn Chinese with Mei Mei 1, produced by Mei Mei Hu.  North Providence, Rhode Island: Mei Mei & Me, 2006.  41 minutes


For parents like me who don't buy into the showy vacuity of "educational" network shows like Dora the Explorer and Ni Hao, Kai-Lan, Mei Mei Hu's old fashioned calmness and authenticity will come as a breath of fresh air.  The first DVD of eight (so far) in her Play & Learn series is low-tech, slow, and didactic by current videographic standards but is thoughtfully organized and extremely effective an as educational tool.  


Mei Mei Hu understands children.  Youngsters who are young enough or sheltered enough not to have been too frequently exposed to the hysterical pace of twenty-first century children's programming will recognize Mei Mei--who reminds me in some ways of the immortal Fred Rogers--as a gifted, caring, and intelligent teacher who respects them as equally smart, capable, well-intentioned human beings.  Toddlers and preschoolers will enjoy learning real Chinese phrases and vocabulary from Mei Mei and will soon be singing along with the simple, catchy, traditional tunes that she introduces.


The program is divided into eight short segments, each of which contains just the right proportion of repetition and novelty to hold children's attention while ensuring that they remember what they have learned.  The choice of vocabulary also lends itself to reinforcement by parents and teachers in everyday home and classroom situations.  Topics covered include Numbers, Parts of the Body, Actions, Greetings, Family, Names, and Ages.


Most of the program segments follow a fairly predictable sequence in which Mei Mei presents new vocabulary twice, very clearly and slowly; the English translation appears on the screen the first time.  One or two children, who do not seem to be native speakers of Chinese but who do pronounce the words clearly and correctly, then recite or demonstrate the same words and phrases a couple of times.  In later segments, the children perform dialogues that would be easy to reproduce in a kindergarten or Saturday-school setting.  Parts IV (Games) and IX (Songs) introduce a wonderful variety of memorable tunes, along with games and drills to help parents and teachers teach and reinforce them.


If your children are learning Chinese, this is a fundamental program to include in your home or school DVD library.  Recommended for ages 1 to 6.

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.

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.

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.