The Fun Stuff

[anagramatica]

We are making an effort to expose Ansel to several languages as early as possible. Macneil knows some Chinese and I know some Spanish (though I am not anywhere near fluent). Mac bought these CDs and we have been playing them a lot. They are really fun!
Spanish
Chinese

I was surprised to find that a couple of the Spanish songs are pretty morose, though

Comments

[mmc12]

What a cool set of blocks! I bet my friend who is an ASL teacher would love those.

I remember singing a couple of those depressing Spanish songs in school as a kid. "Don Gato", etc. Now, that brought down the house at the 4th grade chorus concert. ;)

[anagramatica]

I think we got the blocks from Amazon?
Don Gato is on the CD as well. The only song we sang in Spanish class was A Mover La Colita, as far as I can remember.

[marinav]

It's not so much the exposure to the languages as it is the exposure to the sounds foreign to English that will, in fact, help him later should he decide to learn a foreign language. The sounds are the key and the reason why so many people get L and R mixed up, or are unable to utter sounds that to the native speaker seem natural. For example, in Romanian, there is a sound, a vowel, that is not present in English. I can't explain how it sounds, as a result. It is found in the word for "dog", among others. For some reason, when people ask me to say something in Romanian, they will often ask me to tell them how to say "dog". I try not to torture them, so, instead, I tell them the word for "puppy", which does not contain that vowel. Because they were never exposed to this sound as babies, they are unable to replicate it. Some people have come close, but none have ever been able to repeat it

[anagramatica]

Yeah, that is the concept that the cds we bought are designed around.

[marinav]

Excellent! :o)