A Year at the Center of the World

My parents gave me many wonderful gifts, but among the top few--right up there with breastfeeding me, having a happy marriage, trusting me to make my own decisions, and putting me through the Canadian French immersion system--is the trip we took to Turkey as a family the year I turned fourteen.

We lived on the European side of Istanbul, not far from Taksim Square, and my younger sisters and I attended Lycee Pierre Loti, a school created to educate French children left behind in Turkey during the Second World War.  It was an ancient building, having been, before the Lycee was founded, a French Capuchin seminary in the business of training priests for the Greek, Syrian, Chaldean, and Armenian rites of the Catholic church.  My mother had had to fight to get us in, because, since we were mere Canadians--and Anglophone Canadians at that--our French surely wouldn't be good enough.  We were slightly worried they might be right when the application forms mysteriously demanded, "Do you sleep with your mouth open?"  We got in and I did have trouble--for about a week, after which I picked up the accent and eventually made it onto the honor roll.

That school did great things for my French and also seriously improved my German, which up to that point had been picked up from a year of Saturday school, another year of night classes, and a few months of tutoring.  My classmates took English as their third language (fourth for the 50% or so of the students who were Turkish), and a few spoke it well.  During English class I was allowed to sit and read my own English books; I had a reading list for ninth-grade English from my school at home and had added some titles related to our travels (we were reading The Iliad as a family, for instance).

Since we went to school in French, we didn't learn to speak Turkish fluently during our year in Istanbul. We did learn enough vocabulary and basic phrases to get along in Turkish at the markets, the banks, and the stores.  Some things we learned from the Foreign Service Institute Turkish Basic Course that my father had bought (I was mainly the one who sat with the heavy paperback book and listened to the tapes, and then I drilled my parents and sisters until they got the pronunciation right--I'd always had a good ear for languages), but most we picked up from reading the signs in the stores and bazaars and listening to the shopkeepers and vendors and the other customers.

I do regret that we didn't study Turkish more intensively and more formally when we had the chance to use it every day, but even the small amount that I picked up was valuable: for one thing, it was my second significant exposure to a non-Indo-European language and therefore expanded my understanding of how human languages work, which certainly made it easier for me to pick up other languages later.

The cultural education that I got during my year abroad was far more interesting and more important than  anything that I could have learned in school.  Seeing how people live in another country--but especially a country as different from Canada and the United States as Turkey--changed my life profoundly.  I can't possibly explain how in a short blog post, but some of the little things that stick in my mind, even eighteen years later, are the old men strolling along Istiklal Caddesi, the famous shopping street, with their friends, holding hands; the running water in our apartment being shut off twelve hours a day (we had to light the hot-water boiler with a match), my piano teacher's enormous Turkish rug and the servant who brought us tea before the lesson; the stray cats and dogs that haunted the streets and courtyards at night, and the people who fed them and cared for them; the way the poorest people smiled a lot more than the richer ones; the briefcases full of cash left casually on the sidewalk outside shops while their owners bought meat and bread on the way home from work; the stares that I elicited from walking around bare-headed in some of the provincial towns; the call to prayer broadcast from the minarets five times a day; the trucks painted in brilliant floral designs; the fruits and vegetables in the markets arranged with exquisite precision.  And of course our visits to Troy and Pergamon and Gallipoli and Hattusha were a history course unlike any other.

I learned that there no one culture has a monopoly on beauty, happiness, or knowledge and that a fresh perspective can improve any situation.  I learned that the way my Canadian classmates dressed was not the only way to dress, that their interests and prejudices should not limit my interests and understanding.  I learned that I should not judge other countries and cultures by what I heard on the news.  And I learned that the way I was perceived by the people I'd grown up with was not the only way I could see myself.

I hope that before my children grow up and leave home, I will be able to give them the gift of a year (or two or three) abroad and that it will have as positive an effect on their lives as it did on mine.

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This post is part of the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism.  Learn more about the Carnival and how you can participate by visiting the Carnival founder's blog, Bilingual for Fun.  Check out the most recent Carnival posts by visiting the host blog, Bringing Up Baby Bilingual.

ACCENT ON DUTCH, by guest blogger Francie Gow

My Dutch accent has progressed in fits and starts rather than gradually. The musical training surely helped here too, as did the early exposure to the sounds from hearing my mother speak with Dutch-speaking friends and relatives. However, there were a few sounds particular to Dutch that I could recognize but had trouble imitating for a long time, as I was not forced to try very often.

The first difficult sound I remember conquering was the rolled “r”. When I was eight years old, I spent a week or two with my great-aunt and great-uncle on the family farm in Netterden. Their four sons had learned English in school, so I generally communicated in English through them. They had a lovely dog named Bonnie who could do entertaining tricks, like rolling over or jumping up to push the door closed. I was eager to give her these commands myself, but she simply ignored me when I encouraged her to “rollen” with my wimpy English “r”. I practised and practised making motor noises with my tongue. A few days later, I knew I had finally succeeded when she heard me say “rrrrrrollen” and promptly did a little flip. I could not possibly have found a more exacting—or motivating—teacher.

When I finally decided in my early twenties to learn to speak Dutch, I set about conquering the last of the challenging sounds with the help of taped language lessons and by asking for help from my relatives every time I went to visit. While my Dutch accent today is not nearly as good as my French accent, the head start that I had acquired in childhood helps me sound much more advanced than the relative beginner I really am.

Basically, I can pass for a native speaker, or at least a proficient one, for the first thirty seconds of any conversation. The disadvantage is that whenever I ask for something in a store, I get a long, detailed answer in rapid-fire Dutch. I quickly learned the phrase, “Langzamer, alstublieft!” (More slowly, please!), and I use it constantly.

The advantage is that native speakers are less likely to switch into English to “help” me, thus giving me more opportunities to practise and improve. On a recent trip to The Hague, my partner and I wanted to reserve a guided tour at the Peace Palace. I dialled the number in the guidebook and began the conversation with “Goeden dag. Spreekt u Engels?” (Good day. Do you speak English?) The man at the other end answered, in Dutch, “Yes, of course I do, but I don’t think I will; your Dutch is much too good!” Totally caught off guard, I stammered my way clumsily through the rest of the conversation. However, it did the job, and he congratulated me warmly before hanging up.

Don’t despair if your child’s early exposure to a language is inconsistent at best; it may still facilitate future efforts!

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.

Issues in Chinese Librarianship: Collection Development and Access for Children and Families: An Annotated Bibliography

The goal of this bibliography is to present a core of scholarly articles detailing some of the basic issues relevant to Chinese librarianship in North America, with a focus on service to families and children. 

The nineteen articles in this bibliography have been chosen to provide North American librarians new to Chinese librarianship a broad overview of the main problems and controversies that they are likely to face in working with Chinese collections and attempting to provide the best possible service to children and families in that context. 

Since this is a rapidly developing field of inquiry, only articles written in the 1990s or later have been included; six of the nineteen articles were written in the last two years, and most (fifteen out of nineteen) were published in the year 2000 or later.

The authors discuss representations of Chinese people and Chinese culture in literature for children, the appropriation of Chinese narratives in mainstream American fiction, the current status of the Chinese publishing industry, service to Chinese-speaking children and families, cataloging and retrieval issues, and the role of new technologies in improving access to online and print resources.

In 2000, nearly 3,000,000 people in the United States identified their ethnic background as being wholly or partly Chinese.  After India, China provides more graduate students to U.S. universities than any other foreign country (Werling, 2009).  It is therefore crucial for North American librarians to pay more systematic attention to serving Chinese and Chinese-American patrons and communities in their institutions.

Recent Chinese immigrants may be unfamiliar with North American school and library conventions.  In China and other Asian countries, for instance, school lessons consist mostly of rote learning (Ho, 1990), and Chinese students may be accustomed to more structured lessons and may be less comfortable than American students with asking for help or expressing their needs and opinions (Werling, 2009).  Libraries also tend to be very different from their American counterparts (Werling, 2009) and to be used mostly for studying for tests, working on homework, and socializing rather than for pleasure reading or borrowing books (Ho, 1990).  Therefore, providing the best possible service to Chinese immigrants and their children in North American libraries may involve working to understand and sometimes modify different perspectives on the role of the library in families’ lives.  Orientation programming may help to acclimatize families to the way that North American libraries work.  “If the parents are better oriented to a new culture,” Werling (2009) points out, “they will be able to help their children adapt and cope better (p. 45).

Criteria for judging the “quality” of resources for child and adult audiences may be somewhat different for those who are limited by a language handicap (Ho, 1990), whether as Chinese immigrants looking for information in an English-speaking library environment or as Anglophone learners of Chinese as a second or foreign language.  And those who are not proficient in English may have difficulty understanding what is said during library tours and other library events (Werling, 2009).

Asian Studies departments in academic libraries have recently become important sources of information and pleasure reading for recent immigrants, and some big-city public library branches have recently been developing extensive Chinese collections.   For example, the Chinese Heritage Collection and Chinese language materials held by the Chinatown Branch of the Chicago Public Library form about one-half of the branch’s adult collection and about one-tenth of its children’s collection (Werling, 2009); the Queens Borough Public Library in New York City a 93,000-item collection of Chinese resources, WorldLinQ software that provides Web access and native-language searching capabilities to patrons speaking Asian (and other) languages, as well as services that include cultural arts events and coping skills programs for new Americans and a commitment to recruiting staff with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds (Strong, 1998).  But overall there is a need for academic, public, and school libraries to focus more systematically on providing Chinese resources and services for families and children and on improving access to those resources and services.

Recent immigrants are not the only user groups for Chinese collections in North American libraries, of course.  The diverse populations served by these collections also include scholars in Asian-studies programs and other academic departments such as linguistics, economics, business, comparative literature, history, library and information science, and education; second-, third-, and fourth-generation Chinese Americans and people of mixed ethnic/racial background with widely varying levels of Chinese-language proficiency and connection to Chinese culture; adoptees whose families may know little about Chinese language or culture but want to give their children a connection to their ancestral homeland; and non-Chinese children and adults studying Chinese as a world language or simply wishing to learn a little about Chinese or Chinese-American culture as part of a general multicultural education. 

This brief bibliography is in no way comprehensive but serves as a brief introduction to the problems of Chinese librarianship for those new to the field and particularly for those serving children and families.  Chinese is now the language with the largest number of native speakers in the world and the third most commonly spoken tongue in both the United States (after English and Spanish) and Canada (after English and French), and it is hoped that this situation will be reflected in the collections of more North American libraries in the near future.  Collection-development librarians in public, school, and university libraries will need to familiarize themselves with the problems involved as well as with the growing number of books and other resources that are available.  

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE.

CITATION INFORMATION:

Siu, Susan C. H.  (2009).  Issues in Chinese Librarianship: Collection Development and Access for Children and Families: An Annotated Bibliography.  Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/issuesinchineselibrarianship.

Article on Less-Commonly-Taught Languages Featured in Language Lizard Newsletter

Please check out my article on less-commonly-taught languages (a modified version of an earlier blog post) in the June 2010 issue of the Language Lizard newsletter!

A TALE OF TWO KINDERGARTENS, by guest blogger Francie Gow

About a month after I began French-immersion Kindergarten, my Dutch grandmother died, and my mother brought me and my sister Emily to the Netherlands to spend two months with Opa. While we were there, the grownups decided to send me for part of that time (two or three weeks, perhaps) to the local school. The teacher graciously accepted me as a guest in her classroom and asked the other students to make me feel welcome. 

I have no memory whatsoever of my first month in the French Kindergarten. I presume that we were all taught the phrase “Puis-je aller aux toilettes?” (May I go to the bathroom?) on day one. We were all Anglophones, so although the teacher never used any English with us, I know that she would have used very simple sentences, lots of repetition, and plenty of contextual clues to help us along.

I do, however, have a vivid first-person recollection of parts of my Dutch experience, perhaps because it was so overwhelming. I remember an enormous sense of frustration at not understanding what was going on around me. The adults spoke to me in English and to each other in Dutch. The teacher spoke to the class as a whole in a Dutch that I could not hope to follow, as of course she was aiming it at native speakers, and then she would give me a brief explanation in English so that I could join in the activity. My classmates spoke to each other in Dutch, and to me in slower Dutch accompanied by gestures.

Had I stayed longer, I would have eventually cracked the code and become quite fluent, progressing much faster than I later did in French. I did acquire a large stock of vocabulary words over those two months, mostly related to food, a topic that came up several times a day. However, with the exception of “Ik ben Francie” (I am Francie), which was printed on one of my t-shirts, I never learned to produce a single sentence.

Because the adults were continuing to speak to me in English, no doubt at my insistence and because it was easier, I had no way to pick up verbs, an essential building block for meaningful communication. Therefore, even as my vocabulary grew, I never felt any closer to being able to speak when the time came to return home.

Of course, we all knew that the trip was temporary, so while the grownups no doubt hoped that I would benefit from the exposure to an extent, learning the language was not the primary purpose of my time there. It may have been different if we knew that I would be staying. I imagine that simple story books, read to me repeatedly by patient adults, would have granted me the entry into sentences that I so badly needed to be able to burst through the wall of incomprehension. A strong desire to make friends with my non-English-speaking classmates would have pushed me from there.

While I don’t remember my first days of Kindergarten, I do remember the first days of my return to the French-language classroom in December. In theory, French should have been even less comprehensible to me than Dutch, as there had been no previous exposure to French in my home. However, my only memories of the rest of Kindergarten relate to my classmates and the things we did. I remember learning that I could use the black crayon to make grey by pressing lightly instead of hard. I remember tossing beanbags through holes in a wooden board with a clown painted on it. I remember counting to one hundred. I remember building structures with blocks and pasting macaroni to construction paper. I remember singing songs. I do not remember the fact that I was doing all of this in French.

I recently asked my mother what she remembered from my Kindergarten experience. She told me that a friend of hers had once asked me whether I had learned any French at school that day and was surprised when I replied, “No.” But wasn’t I in French immersion? I looked at her as though she had just said something nonsensical. “We don’t learn French at school,” I explained, “we just speak it.”   

BUNNIES, BROOMS, AND DUTCH VOCABULARY, by guest blogger Francie Gow

I have memories from before starting school of a few Dutch-language books around the house. There were Tintin comic books in Dutch translation, but I could never do much with those beyond looking at the pictures. (I should ask my parents whether we still have them, as I might be just at the right stage for them now!) The simple vocabulary and picture books were more useful.

My sharpest memory is of a Dutch translation of Richard Scarry's The Best Word Book Ever, with its household and community scenes inhabited by cute little human-like animals and labelled in great detail. I had the original English copy as well, so I could compare if I wanted to, but it wasn’t really necessary. I would spend lots of time poring over the pictures, and some of the vocabulary just stuck.

I remember visiting the family farm in the Netherlands when I was eight years old and “playing house” with the neighbour’s daughter, who was the same age. Despite the language barrier, we were able to build an open floor plan out of bales of hay, and we did lots of gesturing to make ourselves understood. I wanted a broom to sweep up the bits of hay, and I was proud as punch when I suddenly remembered the word “bezem” from the Richard Scarry book, and she understood me right away. Using a word successfully in context was an encouraging thrill.  If Scarry’s books were translated into Dutch, I have no doubt they were translated into several other languages as well, so these may be worth hunting down in children’s bookstores on your travels. 

Not all of my books were translations. I still love the bold, colourful illustrations of Dick Bruna, whose iconic Nijntje Konijntje (“Miffy the Rabbit” in English) character is recognizable far beyond the artist’s native Netherlands. I have only just now discovered these adorable interactive Miffy websites, which of course were not available to complement the books when I was growing up. There is even a version in Japanese. Like the Scarry books, I’m certain that the books themselves are available in many more than just these three languages. They may be even easier to find: Bruna began publishing children’s books in 1953, but, unlike Scarry, he still seems to be at it today!

FRENCH IMMERSION AND BEYOND, by guest blogger Francie Gow

I first met Susan in 1982 when our parents enrolled us in the first French immersion class to be offered at our primary school in St. John’s, Newfoundland. We quickly became inseparable, no doubt because of our shared love of language and wild imaginations, and we remained close even after her family moved away in high school. Like Susan, I took to French immersion like a duck to water, despite the fact that our parents did not speak French.

My Dutch-born mother lives primarily in English, her second language, and she came away from her psychology degree with a firm belief in the benefits of second-language learning for children’s brain development.

My father was brought up in Ontario speaking only English, but a commitment to pan‑Canadian bilingualism was really taking off in those latter years of Pierre Trudeau’s leadership, and Dad wanted to make sure that I had the opportunities that came with speaking both of the country’s official languages.

My mother had intended to teach me Dutch at home, and, though I do not remember this, I even had a Dutch-speaking nanny for a while. However, when I was 20 months old, my sister Emily was born with severe cerebral palsy, and my parents’ priorities naturally turned to her rehabilitation.

After graduating from high school, I built on my French in a variety of ways, culminating in a graduate degree in French-to-English translation. While studying in Ottawa, I met the love of my life, a French-speaking Ontarian who speaks near-perfect English and very good Spanish, and who also happens to be the son of two marvellous English-to-French translators.

I am now a legal translator in Montreal, and French is the language I speak most often both at home and at work. I recently realized that my parents’ early decision to facilitate my learning of French has defined almost every aspect of my adult life.

In future posts, I will go into more detail about my experience in learning French, which Susan has labelled a commonly taught language. I also have some experience learning a less-commonly taught language, as I decided to make a real effort to learn Dutch in my early 20’s. I am by no means fluent, but I can now communicate with members of my extended family who do not speak English, and I feel much more connected to my family history. 

Of course, this blog is called LinguistKids. Although I never learned to produce any Dutch as a child, I will explore how some of my early exposure to the language supported my later efforts to acquire it.

Thank you for inviting me to contribute, Susan, and I look forward to chatting with you all in this space!  

Guest Blogger Francie Gow to Write a Series of Posts for LinguistKids

I am happy to announce that my childhood friend Francie Gow will be writing a series of posts for LinguistKids this summer.  Francie went through the French immersion program in Newfoundland and now works as a legal translator in Canada.  She is a brilliant and multi-talented linguist and writer who has travelled widely and used her language skills in a variety of personal and professional contexts.  I am honored to have Francie share her insights on the LinguistKids blog!

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.

Review of LET'S WRITE CHINESE WITH MEI MEI

Let's Write Chinese with Mei Mei, Books 1 & 2, by Mei Mei Hu.  Providence, Rhode Island: Mei Mei and Me, 2007.  $12.95 (2-book set)  ISBN 1-4243-1539-5.


The Foreign Service Institute lists Chinese as a Category 3 language--a language that's exceptionally difficult for English-speaking adults to learn, requiring twice as much study time as, say, Georgian, Turkish, or Vietnamese.  I assume that this classification is based on the complexity of the Chinese writing system, since the spoken language is not particularly difficult.  People like me who are trying to learn and thousands of Chinese characters and find ways of teaching them to our young children can use all the help we can get.

Mei Mei Hu's two-book set of Chinese-character writing workbooks features 176 single characters (Book I) and 176 two-character compound words and phrases (Book II) with four words or phrases per page and six large spaces in which to practice writing each character.  The number of words introduced in each book would be ideal to cover in a year-long Saturday-school course or a semester-long Chinese immersion course.  Children familiar with Mei Mei's "Play & Learn" DVD series will be happy to see many words whose meanings they already know.

These large-format books are easy for young children to handle, and the characters are carefully arranged so as to make them as easy to remember as possible.  The simplest and most common characters are taught first, and more difficult characters and compounds words and phrases are introduced gradually.  The first character of each compound in Book II is a character previously introduced in Book I, and most of the compounds are arranged in groups of four words or phrases with the same initial character, helping to reinforce characters already learned and set a foundation for further vocabulary development.

Mei Mei Hu's books are an essential tool in any child's Chinese-language education, especially considering that there are so few other character-writing workbooks available for English-speaking children; I have seen none of comparable intuitiveness and simplicity.  Recommended for ages 5 and up.

French Nursery Rhymes, PART I

Dors, bébé, dors


Dors, bébé, dors
Car j'entends au-dehors
Un mouton blanc, un mouton noir,
Qui disent: Enfant, enfant, bonsoir;
Et si l'enfant ne veut dormir,
On verra bientôt accourir
Un noir ou blanc petit mouton,
Pour picoter le pied mignon
De mon joli petit poupon.


Sleep, Baby, Sleep


Sleep, Baby, sleep,
For outside I hear
A white sheep, a black sheep,
Say: Child, child, good eve;
And if the child will not sleep,
Soon running up we'll see
A black or white little sheep
To nibble the sweet little feet
Of my pretty little babe.




Chanson de berceau d'une petite soeur


Joli berceau, je t'en prie,
Berce mon petit frère chéri.


Garde-toi bien de l'éveiller;
Sans quoi me faudrait veiller.


Ne le jette ni ça ni là;
Car j'en aurais du tracas.


Ne me le fais pas tomber;
Car tu me le ferais crier.


Ne le jette point s'en dessus-dessous,
Pour qu'il dorme tout son soûl.


Cradle song of a little sister


Pretty cradle, you I pray,
Rock my little brother dear.


Be very careful not to wake him; 
Or I'll have to sit up with him.


Do not toss him here nor there;
It'll cause me fuss and care.


Don't make him tumble down;
Or you'll make him scream and howl.


Don't cause him to be upset,
So he'll sleep to his heart's content.


Le réveil


J'ai bien dormi!
J'étais parti
Loin, loin d'ici!
Me revoici,
Maman aussi.
Mon Dieu, merci!


The Awakening


I slept well!
I was away
Far, far from here
Here I am again,
Mommy too.
My God, thank you!


Bébé apprend à marcher


Trotte, bébé, trotte;
Donne-moi ta menotte;
Un, deux, trois,
Bébé a fait un pas.


Baby Learns to Walk


Trot, Baby, trot;
Give me your tiny hand;
One, two, three,
Baby took a step.


Deux et trois


Un et deux et trois bas,
Deux et trois font cinq, n'est-ce pas?
Si l'un d'eux je perds,
M'en restera deux paires.


Two and Three


One and two and three socks,
Two and three are five, or not?
If one of them I should mislay,
Two pairs with me will stay.


SOURCE OF FRENCH RHYMES: La mère l'oie: Poésies, énigmes, chansons et rondes enfantines, edited and illustrated by L. Richter & F. Pocci.  New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1877.  English translations by Susan C. H. Siu, 2010.

Why Your Children Should Learn a Less-Commonly-Taught Language

More than 300 distinct languages other than English are now spoken in the United States.  According to the U. S. Census Bureau's 2009 Statistical Abstract, those with the most native speakers in this country are Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, French, Vietnamese, German, and Korean (all with numbers of speakers in the millions), followed by Russian, Arabic, and Italian.

Other languages with large numbers of speakers (in no particular order) include Portuguese, French Creole, Yiddish, Greek, Polish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Navajo, Laotian, Thai, Hmong, Hindi, Urdu, and Serbo-Croatian.

The most- commonly-taught languages are Spanish, French, and German, which do happen to be among the top-ten most-commonly spoken languages in the U.S but also all happen to be Indo-European languages closely related to English.  All of the world's other languages are classified as "less-commonly-taught." 

Of course there are many reasons to learn languages other than the number of people who speak them (whether in the U.S. or abroad).  Here are some reasons why your children should learn a less-commonly-taught language.

•  To get to know their family history.  Many North Americans, even if they no longer speak a language other than English, Spanish, French, or German at home, have ancestors who did.  Did you perhaps have a Native American great-grandfather or a Ukrainian immigrant grandmother, or are you descended from African slaves who spoke Mende, Fula, or another West African language?  Or perhaps your child's connection to a less-commonly-taught language is even closer, as for my niece Sophia, who is learning Georgian in order to communicate with her grandmother and cousins in the Republic of Georgia and in the United States.

• To read or do research in another language.  Do your high-school-aged children want to read the Bible, the Torah, or the Buddhist scriptures in their original languages?  Do they love modern Egyptian novels, Japanese comic books, or Chinese Taoist poetry?  Do they want to attend school abroad for a short time?  Do they plan to study history, art history, international studies, computers, languages, comparative literature, translation, or linguistics in college?  If so, they might want to start studying a less-commonly-taught language now.

•  To make new friends in their community.  If you live in a community where less-commonly-taught languages are spoken, learning one of those languages may help your children make new friends and connections within the community.  This may be true even if you don't live in a big city.  In Lewiston, Maine, where I live, for example, there is a large Somali community and knowing the Somali language would be very helpful to anyone attending the public schools as well as to anyone wanting to get involved with community organizations, from the library to the farmer's market to the hospitals.  (See Newsweek's very interesting article, “The Refugees Who Saved Lewiston,” on the Web at http://www.newsweek.com/id/180035).

• To travel and make new friends abroad.  If your family is going on vacation to Ireland, perhaps your children would benefit from learning some Irish Gaelic.  If your child plans to go on an exchange program to India, she might want to learn some Hindi, Gujarati, or one of India's several hundred other mother tongues.  If you or your spouse will be stationed in Kuwait or South Korea in the near future, your children could benefit greatly from learning to speak Arabic or Korean.

• To help save a dying language from extinction.  More than half of the world's approximately 6000 languages are now considered "endangered," which means that there will be no native speakers left a hundred years from now.  Many have only one, ten, or a few hundred speakers as I write; others have become extinct in the recent past.  Some communities are now making efforts to save their endangered languages from extinction by teaching them to both children and adults.  Linguists are attempting to preserve others on paper or in audio and video formats so that they will still be able to study them when they are no longer spoken and learn more about human language in general or about specific language families.  Your child can participate in this important work by learning and sharing an endangered language.  For more information, please visit the Endangered Language Alliance website at http://endangeredlanguagealliance.org/.

As you and your children start on this vital and empowering mission, I’ll leave you with a couple of additional resources:

•  The University of Minnesota maintains a website through its Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA).  This website provides listings of K-12 and college/university course offerings in less-commonly taught languages, lists of relevant organizations, and even audio and video files that can be used by educators free of charge.  Check it out at the following URL: http://www.carla.umn.edu/lctl/.

• The Ethnologue project aims to provide a comprehensive catalog of the world’s living languages.  The online version is available at http://www.ethnologue.com/.

I wish you and your children the best of luck as you embark on your language-learning adventures.  Please check back for future posts on specific less-commonly-taught languages here at LinguistKids!

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.