Languages on a Budget--or, The Thoughtful Use of Technology, Old and New

© Squareplum - Fotolia.com

I am teaching my children three languages (French, Chinese, and Spanish) in addition to English, and I am doing it on a tight budget, so I am learning to take better advantage of the resources that I have available to me--especially the free and very inexpensive ones.  I am also always working to strike the best possible balance, considering our particular circumstances, between new- and old-fashioned ways of doing things.  Whenever I can, I try to keep things connected.  The kids love to meet familiar themes and characters in different contexts; it makes learning new things safer and even more fun.

Television

Those who have read my previous blog entries know that I am not impressed with television watching as a default mode of existence.  Since our family's no-television experiment last summer, we've managed to keep the TV in our language-learning toolbox without letting it take the place of other, more important, things.  The children watch about twice a week, nearly always in French (sometimes in Chinese).  The TV is one of our more expensive tools, since I have to order most of the DVDs from France, but with only a few hours a week of viewing, I don't have to order new ones very often.  The more repetition they get, the more they understand the French dialogues, anyway, and the more I remember to incorporate the vocabulary and phrases used in the DVDs in our everyday conversations.  I have just posted, separately, a list of the DVDs that our kids have been watching recently.

YouTube

YouTube contains an incredible wealth of language-learning material.  The problem is that there are practically no filters or sorting, which means that the user has to wade through all the junk herself—a major problem when you have a determine four-year-old who knows how to point and click.  I will occasionally get on YouTube with the kids and look for educational or otherwise interesting videos in French, Chinese, or Spanish, but it usually becomes a struggle when Sebastian decides, after a few minutes, that he wants to click on the suggested videos at the side of the screen by himself.  Within three or four clicks, inevitably, he’s watching car commercials or clips from actions movies—in English—I take away the computer, and he’s screaming.  Thank goodness we don’t have cable TV!

Computer Games/Online Courses

I’m hoping that there will be more available in this area when my children are a bit older.  So far, the pickings online seem to be slim.  The best online course that I’ve found so far is a Spanish course called Foreign Language Friends, which has a minimal registration fee and has really helped to motivate Sebastian to learn some Spanish.  It’s well organized so he can navigate independently, and it’s immersion-based, although they do cheat and give some of the instructions in English.  It is rather limited in the number of different topics you can explore, but it is supposed to be growing.  They plan to add Chinese and French versions in the future.  My only real problem with Foreign Language Friends is that the servers are often overloaded, so that I sometimes have trouble logging in, which is frustrating for both me and Sebastian.  The other online games that I’ve found seem to involve mainly mindless, repetitive tasks and very little language, although Sebastian’s favourite, Poissonrouge.com, does seem to have some educational merit.

JumpStart has a "Languages" program that includes French, Spanish, and Japanese "Pavilions" that a child can "visit," and Sebastian has actually learned some things from playing this game.  Even the English Pavilion has some very good content, but, unfortunately, he seems to spend most of his time there, so it hasn't been a very effective way of increasing his exposure to French or Spanish.

I recently bought Sebastian a CdRom game, Adibou joue avec les mots et les nombres, based on the Adibou television series (this plays on my regular DVD player as well as my region-free media player, by the way), which focuses on science concepts in a short, quick, rather hyperactive way.  It looks promising, but I haven't been able to get him to play it yet.  He and the other kids do like the television show, although it's a little too jumpy for my taste.  (By the way, I was unable to order the CdRom from Amazon.fr; it couldn't be shipped to the U.S., for some reason, even though the seller offered international shipping.  I was lucky enough to find a brand new copy on eBay.)

Tapes--Audio and Video

Don't throw out that old VHS or audiotape player yet!  If you are trying to teach your children to speak another language on a budget, you may want to take advantage of resources in so-called "obsolete" formats.  Our VHS player recently stopped working, and I already miss it; I think we have another one in storage somewhere.  I am happy that we also have several audiotape players in the house and even one in the minivan.  This means that I can take advantage of cheaper, older versions of French and Spanish music albums that I see on Amazon or on eBay (I just make sure to read the "condition" notes before I order), used language-learning courses that I see at garage sales or library sales and that I wouldn't never be able to afford brand-new CD versions of, and rare thrift-store finds such as the "Fonetica Funky" tape that I found at the Salvation Army store last week and that contains songs teaching the alphabet, vowels, consonants, the days of the week, the months of the year, and much more, all in Spanish.

Going Way Back--Vinyl Records

I never thought I'd go as far back as vinyl records in my quest to find good and inexpensive materials for my children's language-learning endeavors, but earlier this winter I suddenly received about a hundred albums weeded from my father's large record collection, and my husband Steve dug his old turntable out of storage.  I have to say that the record player is now my most essential piece of technology for the kids.  My father took care of his records, and they play as well as they did when I was a girl.  Since he was a professor of sociology and occasionally taught sociology of music courses as well as discussing music in his introductory courses, he had an incredible collection of albums from all over the world, so my children are now getting some exposure to many languages other than English, French, Spanish, and Chinese, as well as a rich world-music appreciation course!  I've got my daughter Serena dancing to the folk songs of Papua New Guinea, my son Sebastian trying to play Bolivian panpipes, and my baby, Kai, imitating a Turkish call to prayer from his highchair.  We can connect nearly everything we read, see, or experience to some of these musical adventures.  

Of course we're listening to some of the albums more than others. One of our favourites has been a children's album called Une Girafe à l'école, by Suzanne Pinel, which my parents must have bought for me and my sisters when we were little.  The kids have nearly memorized the songs on that one, and this inspired me to look for other records at our local thrift stores; since our community in Maine was heavily French-speaking a generation or two ago, I hope to find some treasures this way.  So far I've found one: an album by Quebec pop singer Nathalie Simard titled Nathalie au pays des merveilles, which also has very memorable songs.

Microfiche?

I am actually contemplating the possibility of buying a portable microfiche reader for our house.  This seemingly insane idea arose while I was looking for French-language books in our state library catalogue online and noticed that a huge proportion of the collections were old books on microfiche.  While looking through a lens in a box is never going to beat the experience of sitting on the sofa reading a picture book to the kids, it will give me access to information in French that I wouldn't have otherwise--perhaps even some local history and other primary sources--and the children might even get excited about having another new machine to play with.

The No-Television Experiment, Day 13

The children have four good-quality recorders in their toy box, and for at least a year I've been meaning to start teaching Sebastian and Serena how to play, but since I haven't played myself since my ninth-grade year in Istanbul, I've kept putting it off.  Well, this Monday, after several hours of playing with some cardboard boxes in the back yard with Serena, Sebastian came into the living room looking for something to do.  This is the time of day when I used to say he could put on a DVD--when he seemed to have exhausted his creativity for the day and we were all a bit tired an impatient.  Since there was no TV this time (he hasn't even asked this week), he went over to the basket of books that we keep in a corner of the living-room floor and picked out a recorder book that I'd picked up at a garage sale or a thrift store on some long-forgotten weekend, brought it over to me, and said happily, "Let's play recorder!"

I've been wanting to start him on an instrument since he turned three last summer.  He's loved violin music since he was a baby, and just after this third birthday my friend Francie gave him a few lessons during a week-long visit (and again when we visited her for her wedding celebration in Newfoundland), which he adored, so last fall I embarked on a several-month-long journey to find him a teacher.  

I finally found someone who was willing to teach violin to such a young child, but Sebastian didn't respond to her like he did to Francie.  He found her intimidating and refused to try anything she suggested, hiding behind my legs and making funny faces until we decided to call it off until he was older (or, I thought to myself, until I could find him a teacher with whom he'd feel more comfortable).  I grew up playing piano and would like to teach him to play piano, too, but I don't currently have one in the house.  For now, I am happy that, because of the No-Television Experiment, we have finally started learning to play the recorder together.  

I was pretty good at the recorder as a child, by the admittedly low standards of school recorder-playing.  In my school in Istanbul, all we did in music class all year long was play the flûte à bec, and the teacher (who once got hit in the forehead by a flying piece of recorder belonging to one of my classmates) used to have me demonstrate every new piece to the class before they attempted to play in a cacophony of squeaks and squeals (I guess that says something for the quality of Canadian music education).  Okay, the competition was basically nil, but, still, I was a decent recorder player and enjoyed playing.

I found out only much later that the recorder is not just a toy instrument invented for the purpose of helping children to make lots of noise at school but a serious instrument with a long history and the capability to produce beautiful music (see Jim Phypers's recorder website for a brief historical overview and some nice recordings of recorder music to start out with).  It remains an excellent first instrument for a child because the basics are uncomplicated and because it's practically indestructible and very inexpensive to buy or replace; a high-quality instrument can be had online for $20 or less. 

Our first three days of "lessons" (all initiated by Sebastian) have been a lot of fun.  Sebastian has learned the proper method for "tongueing" and knows how to play the notes "B" and "A."  The only problem is that his hands are a bit small to cover all the holes simultaneously; perhaps a sopranino recorder (the smallest type) would work better for him until he gets a little bigger, but if I try that I will have to find a sopranino method since the notes are not the same as on a regular (soprano) recorder.  

There are six basic types of recorder: in addition to the sopranino (or descant) and soprano, which are the smallest and highest-pitched, there exist alto (or treble), tenor, bass, and contra-bass varieties.  Others, including the 8-to-9-foot-tall sub-contrabass, are less commonly played (not to mention expensive).  

I have, of course, already taught my children to say "flûte à bec."  Now that we've gotten over our first recorder-playing hurdle--getting started--I figure I might as well make this another opportunity to learn some French, which shouldn't be too hard since I had that entire year of French scholastic recorder-playing in Istanbul.  I've been trying to refresh my memory as to the relevant vocabulary, and I can already see that learning to play the recorder in French will be rich in new vocabulary for the kids.  

First there are the names of the musical notes, which do not go by the letters of the alphabet (C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C) as in English but use the solfège system (Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si, Do).  There will be the names of the individual fingers and of the note and rest lengths (my favourite is the quarter rest, called the "soupir," or sigh, in French).  And of course there will be lots of verbs, such as "hold," "play," "cover," "uncover," "move," "wait," "start," "repeat," and so on, most of which will be useful in other everyday conversations, too.  I am especially anxious to add more verbs to the kids' French vocabulary, since they currently know mostly nouns and set phrases.

I have found some helpful websites by searching on Google.fr (France) and Google.ca (Canada).  My favourite so far is a site called: Flûtalors from Quebec, which is nicely organized with audio demonstrations and traditional French children's songs to play with each new note that is introduced.  If anyone finds something even better (in French or another language), please feel free to post the link(s) here!

There are also a large number of recorder-method books available in French for those who would like to combine their children's musical education with a French-immersion experience (the amount of text is probably small enough to be manageable even to parents who aren't fluent speakers/readers of the language).  These vary from compilations of the same old pieces that you played on the recorder in elementary school to international compilations; methods based on African, Middle Eastern, or Celtic folk tunes; and rock and jazz methods.  Actually, I think recorder methods are one area in which there are a greater variety of books available in French than in English, although we English speakers do have Harry Potter for Recorder. 

I'm off to play some more flûte à bec.  More no-television and recorder-playing updates coming soon!

ACCENT ON FRENCH, by guest blogger Francie Gow

I may not be able to fool everybody all the time, but my French accent is finally good enough to allow me to blend in with the Francophones around me. Actually, it would be more accurate to say my French accents, as I find myself adjusting to the environment depending on whether I am in Quebec or in France.

I don’t think I was born with a particular talent for accents; I simply had and found the right opportunities. When I was four years old, my parents signed me up for violin lessons, and my musical education continued through my early university years. I also taught some violin in my late teens and early twenties. The sense of pitch I developed while tuning all those tiny violins before each beginner fiddle class has helped me hear and imitate the nuances of spoken French. I have no doubt that Susan’s background in piano has contributed to her own ease in distinguishing the sounds of new languages.

I was also fortunate to have been taught in my early years by several native French speakers, mostly from Quebec, as well as by Anglophones who had previously spent a significant amount of time in French environments. When I later taught English conversation courses in France, I could hardly blame the students for speaking English with such thick French accents; most of their teachers did too!

After high school, I spent summers in French-language programs in Quebec, studied French at Memorial University (one of my most helpful courses there was in French phonetics—I highly recommend glancing through the guide to phonetic symbols that appears in the front of any good dictionary), lived and worked in France for a year, studied translation and worked as a French-to-English translator in Ottawa, and then studied law in a bilingual program in Montreal. As I mentioned in my first post, I also fell for a handsome Francophone while in Ottawa and am now fully integrated into his French-speaking family.

In other words, with some help from those early advantages I mentioned, I have developed my accent through a slow and steady evolution, and through thousands of hours of listening and speaking. My only regret is that I have no memory of how I sounded at various stages of my French-language development. I wish I had recordings of myself speaking French in primary school, at the end of high school, after my French degree, and again just after my return from France. If your child is learning a language that he or she does not already speak natively, you may want to squirrel away some samples now to play back at a later date.