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

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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.

French DVDs: Our Recent Favourites

Here are the French DVDs that my kids have been watching over the last six months or so:

• Le Petit Nicolas: cartoon version of the classic stories by Jean-Jacques Sempé and Rene Goscinny.  I hope that this will motivate the kids to read the original books in a few years!
• Pierre et le loup.  This combination live-action/cartoon interpretation of Peter and the Wolf, starring Kirstie Alley, Ross Malinger, and Lloyd Bridges, was originally produced in English and won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Program and numerous other awards in 1996.  My disc has seven language choices: French, German, Italian, English, Dutch, Hebrew, and Spanish.
• Thomas le Petit Train: French translation of the popular Thomas the Tank Engine television series.  I wouldn't let the kids watch this in English, but my oldest somehow adores Thomas anyway, and the rich language makes it worth watching in French.
• Kirikou: cartoon films by Michel Ocelot.  The magical baby Kirikou saves his village from a series of disasters orchestrated by a powerful witch who seeks to destroy him.  Refreshingly different from anything ever produced in North America--nudity and all!  Ocelot also produced Azur et Asmar, a fascinating story of brotherhood across cultures and social classes.
• L'alphabet des tout-p'tits, with Francis Perrin: teaches the alphabet in French through songs and simple cartoons.
• La Princesse au petit pois and La Chèvre de Monsieur Seguin: classic tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Alphonse Daudet in updated cartoon versions.
• L'histoire du chameau qui pleure: an amazing view into the lives of a nomadic Mongolian family.  The film (not really a children's movie, but the kids like it almost as much as the adults do) tells the story of a young camel who has trouble giving birth to her first baby and then refuses to nurse him.  A violinist is brought in to help.  The dialogue is in French, so there are no sub-titles to read.

(Don't forget that you will need to acquire a region-free DVD player in order to watch these DVDs if you live in North America or elsewhere outside of Zone 2 (Europe, Japan, South Africa, Middle East).)

I have recently ordered a copy of the Asia for Kids program After School Chinese and will post a list of our other recent Chinese discoveries soon!

Region-Free DVD Viewing

I have just received my new iView Media Player in the mail, after a two-week wait, and can now play DVDs from France (or anywhere in the world)!  The children are now watching Thomas et ses amis (the French version of Thomas and Friends, available only in France), and they don't even seem to notice that it's in French.  Sebastian has been enamored of Thomas for about a year, although he's only seen one or two episodes in English, and it's much less flashy and hyperactive than most of the shows created for children these days, so I ordered a Thomas DVD  from Amazon.fr as soon as I ordered my multiregion DVD player.

The iView Media Player cost me 56.99 USD, including shipping, from www.samstores.com, took about 30 seconds to set up, and is working beautifully so far...

We are only watching television twice a week now, but I already have two children's films originally created in France for our next couple of viewing sessions.  I hope to wean Sebastian off Thomas and Friends and onto classic French children's films as soon as possible.  I think there must be some good African children's films in French and will start looking into that as a project for the new year.

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!