Rosetta Stone

I will try to review different language products every week. My first review will be of Rosetta Stone Japanese. Although this review is for the Japanese version, I believe the software basically works the same way for all the languages they have. I believe they have the software in over thirty languages.

First Impressions: The software is definitely different from most others. The software has three levels. Each level is sold separately. Rosetta Stone does not use English as the medium for you to learn Japanese. It does not give you the English words and then tell you what the equivalent of it is in Japanese. Instead it uses an immersion method. You start off right away listening to the foreign language. It seems frustrating at first because the software just starts you off listening to the foreign language without much guidance. You click on a picture, and it will tell you whether you picked the right picture for the word you see and hear. The levels are split into different sessions. When you finish a session, it will give you a percentage of what was responded to correctly. Although the process was somewhat painful in the beginning, you do start to form meanings for the words being used. You get to see the words used in different situations. Over time, you form a meaning for the word by seeing it being used in various contexts. The different words are then used together to make sentences.

Positives: Rosetta Stone comes with a software where you can talk into a speaker. The software will then let you know how well you are pronouncing the words compared to native speakers. I think that this is a great feature for people trying to concentrate on listening and speaking as opposed to reading and writing.

Negatives: Since the meanings of the words are formed by looking at the pictures, it is important that the pictures are clear in what they are trying to convey. Some pictures are not completely clear. For example, some of the pictures have the children in mid-air. That could mean a lot of things from jump to falling. This is somewhat of a limitation. Although the meaning of the words becomes clearer after you see it in several contexts, some pictures are a bit confusing in the beginning. I believe that this is more of a limitation of the pictures themselves because it is hard to show clearly some actions. The immersion method in real life is used with people moving, not pictures. When the immersion method is applied to pictures, it is hard to show some verbs.

Lasting Impressions: We started having our oldest son, who is 5, use the Rosetta Stone software. We told him that it was a game in the beginning. He seemed to believe us that it was a game for a little bit, but he soon realized that it was a little more work than fun. He now uses Rosetta Stone every couple of days. We usually offer him some kind of prize for getting a certain score. We only have him practice the part of the software where he listens to a word, and then he chooses the corresponding picture. He has been using it for a few weeks. Rosetta Stone does seem to have taught him some new words that he can recognize. His percentage for correct answers has been going up so he is connecting the pictures to the words being spoken. Last week I also noticed that he used a phrase from Rosetta Stone. A plane was coming down from the sky, and he said “hikooki tonde emas” which I think means “plane landing” or “plane coming down”. Overall, I think Rosetta Stone is a good software for learning another language. Rosetta Stone is interactive, and even my five-year-old son is willing to use it every couple of days even though it is some work.

Strategies to help our children become bilingual.

We believe that videos, DVDs and CDs can help our children start in a language. Well developed media mediums might help our children learn basic verbs and nouns. They can provide somewhat of a beginning foundation. Videos might also serve as a good source of review if your child already knows a second language. For younger viewers, the videos might also provide a chance for them to hear the foreign language from a native speaker. When my husband and I buy foreign language videos for our kids, it is always important to us that the speakers in the video have native-like pronunciation. With some languages, it might be hard to find native speakers in the United States. Videos can offer this window of opportunity.

We have been actively trying to expose our children to foreign languages through interactions. Unfortunately, we live in a part of the country where there is hardly any racial diversity. We literally increased the minority population percentage in our town by 30% when we moved here (and there is only the five of us in our family). When our first son was born, we actually lived in a much more diverse part of the country. We hired a Mandarin speaking nanny for our son. My husband and I both had to work so we had needed a nanny anyway. Our nanny at the time was awesome. She spoke to our oldest son in Mandarin, and he actually seemed to understand her. When he was 24 months though, we had to move. My husband found another job. We could not find another mandarin speaking person where we currently live. Our sons budding mandarin capabilities have unfortunately dissipated. He still knows some words, but he has definitely forgotten a lot. This was very discouraging for us. After this, we vowed to keep our children on a language once they started it.

When our son turned 4, we enrolled him in Chinese School. Chinese School is usually on the weekends. Different Chinese Schools differ in their goals for teaching the children. Some aim to teach children who already know Mandarin while others are trying to help children with no practice with Mandarin at all learn the language. There are some schools that also have Cantonese, but I would say that Mandarin is the predominate language. There are different language schools. The schools are usually run by organizations or a group of people with a particular interest. We enrolled our son in a school that taught mandarin to children that had no experience. We did this because we thought our son had basically forgotten all the mandarin that he did know. We were happy to find that there was some benefit left from our son learning mandarin as a baby/toddler. During classes, the children would copy the teacher to pronounce words. Out of the other 10 kids in the class, the teacher would always comment what great pronunciation our son had. She said that he sounded native like, and that she originally thought that he already knew Mandarin. We were very proud of him.

Chinese School seemed to be very helpful for our son. Although he did not become fluent, it did help him learn more words. The school also provided a sense of community which I think helped our son because he could see other people trying to learn the same things. There are different language schools so I would encourage you to look into finding a language school for your child if you are interested in a particular language for them.

When we moved, we could not find a Mandarin speaking nanny. We were, however, able to find a Japanese speaking nanny. Our kids were older by now, and they had no experience in Japanese. We had the Japanese nanny teach them words here and there, but their communication was 99% in English. We realized after a while that the children needed to hear the language more in order to reach any type of real understanding. We asked her to speak in only Japanese, but she was very uncomfortable with that. She would speak mostly in English with a Japanese word thrown here and there. It was not until about 8 months ago that she started to speak in Japanese. She still uses English, but more Japanese. I believe the challenge now is that the children are older. They communicate more with each other than the nanny at this point. When they do communicate with each other, of course it is mostly in English. We have noticed a good amount of progression in their language learning since the nanny has started to speak in mostly Japanese. Even though the children do not interact with the nanny that much, they do seem to understand a lot of what she says. We only wish that she had spoken to them in Japanese earlier! I would say that they can understand about 60% of what she says, and they respond in about 20% Japanese. How much the children respond in Japanese really depends on how many Japanese interactions they get from the nanny. It is almost like a light switch. When they are with the nanny, they know that she speaks Japanese so they will try to speak Japanese. When she speaks to them a lot, I can hear the children respond in Japanese almost 30% of the time. Other times though when the nanny really isn’t speaking that much, I hardly hear one single Japanese word from the kids. With neither I nor my husband knowing that much Japanese though, we are proud of the progression they have made so far. We hope to keep their Japanese going for a few more years, and we hope by then that they will have at least proficiency.

When they have proficiency in Japanese, we hope to expand their mandarin capabilities by finding a Mandarin speaking nanny. We hope by then that we will be able to find a mandarin speaking nanny unlike our first try when we moved here.

Building a Genius Baby.....One Language at a Time

When I was pregnant with our first child, my husband and I started reading about language development. One of our books said "a baby can potentially learn as many languages as you can imagine". This set off crazy expectations in our minds. We started to try to figure out a way that our children could learn Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, French and Japanese. Of course we assumed that our baby would pick up English quite easily. We bought tons of books in foreign languages.....at least two for each of the languages I mentioned. We were sure that our children would be multilingual because they would be exposed to all these languages.

We were wrong! While all these books and tapes were probably entertaining, they did not really help our children reach any real type of proficiency. What children really need for language development is interactions with people of that other language. This is how they truly learn....by interacting with somebody of the other language. This interaction is somewhat a slow process that takes time. Although we still believe that our children will be multilingual as adults, we realized that being multilingual should be a long term goal. It was not quite as easy to have our children learn a foreign language as some of the books we read.

We realized that we should let our children be children instead of trying to make them into multilingual geniuses. We bought into the pressure of always trying to give our child a new skill that will make them ahead of the class. The funny thing about this is that more recent articles have discussed how it is truly the children who had imaginative free time who really excel. It seems that making your child read early or learning their numbers early only gives them a temporary edge. In the long run, children who were not allowed to be children usually feel burned out. As they get older, they lack their own motivation truly needed to succeed. Children who had more laid back childhoods tend to have more imagination and eventual drive to succeed.

Does this mean we as parents should stop trying to educate our children? Of course not! This just means that we should try to find experiences that will spark our children’s curiosities and let them experiment with their environment on their own. Helping our children to be successful is like the hare and the tortoise. Slow and Steady

Learning by ear is easy.....well, not quite

Learning by ear is a phrase that people use to describe language learning. Originally people thought that it was easy for children to pick up and learn any language because their brains are wired to do so. More recent studies have found this to be true and not so true. It is true that babies are wired to pick up language. It is not necessarily true though those children learn language easily. From almost at the beginning of birth, children try to learn language. Babies first listen to what we have to say, and then they try to imitate us. When babies first imitate us, it comes out sounding like babble. Eventually the sounds start to some together to form words we recognize. It is not until about 1 year old that the baby starts to speak his/her first words. Babies differ in their language ability so some might speak before they are 1 and some might start to speak afterwards. At 3 years old, some children might speak clear sentences while other might be struggling to connect simple nouns and verbs. Studies have shown that children need to be able to connect words and objects. This means that it helps when caretakers say a word while moving an object so that the child can associate the object with that word. The movement helps the child remember.

You might wonder than why is it that children seemingly learn a language faster. This might have to do with the necessity for the child to learn the language. For babies, language is the way that they can clearly communicate. For adults, there is usually not that kind of extreme necessity because adults can use another language. Adults are also able to take care of themselves. Babies depend completely on others so it is in their favor to learn the caretaker’s language as fast as possible. Since the baby is completely dependent on his/her caretaker, the baby is usually immersed in the language. This immersion helps the baby learn the language. Babies are also usually more willing to try to speak a new language because they are not embarrassed to make mistakes unlike many adults.

One thing seems to hold true about learning a language early as children is that children tend to have better pronunciation of the language. It seems to be true that children are better at hearing different sounds of a language. If a child does not hear certain sounds of a language as a child, it becomes more difficult for that child to hear those sounds as an adult. This became apparent to me when I was using some Cantonese with my own kids. My husband does not speak any Cantonese. I was telling the kids that I wanted to go upstairs. My husband asked me why I was saying a word twice. I did not know what he meant so I said it again. He again thought I said a word twice. It turns out he thought the words in Cantonese of "want" and "up" were the same words. I kept saying it to him, but he could not hear the difference. This was amazing to me because the words sounded completely different to me. We realized that the difference in our listening is that Cantonese (Mandarin as well) has different tones. If the sound at the end of the word goes up, it completely changes the meaning of the word. Since I grew up listening to my parents speak, it was easy for me to understand the difference in the tones. Since my husband did not have a trained ear, he had a lot more difficulty. English words do not really change with tone so my husband's ear was not trained to listen for this as a child. This made it difficult for my husband to even hear the differences now as an adult. One can only assume that a person would need to be able to hear the sounds in order for him/her to be able to imitate the language properly and to sound native-like.

People are able to learn a language at any age, but it might be more difficult for the adult to hear some uncommon sounds and to sound native-like. Adults benefit though from having more of a focused learning meaning that someone can sit down and tell them about how nouns and verbs interact in a certain language. Babies/Children have to figure out how the nouns and verbs interact on their own through listening and practicing.

A good article I found about this subject was from an interview with a professor at Harvard. The professor's name is Catherine Snow. http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/features/snow10012002.html

Just starting off........

This blog will chronicle our family as we try to help our children become bilingual. I am starting this blog to share experiences and to gain insight from others. Please join us on this journey as we try to raise our children to be global citizens!

To start off, we have three young children. They are ages 1, 3, and 5. I have always found it fascinating when people know more than one language. Unfortunately neither I nor my husband is fluent in a second language. I grew up speaking Cantonese which is a dialect of Chinese. I can still speak Cantonese, but it is more of the "kitchen table" Cantonese. This means that I can understand and speak basic Cantonese involving experiences that occur everyday. I would not be able to speak in depth about poetry or anything like that in Cantonese. I took Spanish in high school so I have a working knowledge of it. My Spanish is rusty though since I have not used it in several years.

My husband has a working knowledge of Spanish as well from high school. I think these days that almost everybody in the US knows a few words in Spanish. My husband is also conversational in Japanese. He took Japanese in school as well.

We would like our children to be bilingual. We believe that this will open opportunities for them in the future in terms of career as well as make them more open-minded.

In the coming weeks, I plan to do the following:
1) Centralize several foreign language websites and resources by categorizing them so that parents will have a easier time finding what they need about children learning a foreign language.
2) We will also review and discuss some foreign language materials that my husband and I have used.