As I grew up in five countries, I care a lot about teaching my daughter world languages. Previously, I completed my student teaching in an International Baccalaureate school where all students learned Mandarin Chinese. Now, I love the idea of teaching my children to speak many languages, but I’m at a disadvantage because the only language I speak fluently is English. When I tried out the Rock N Learn company’s new Learn a Language DVD, I was excited that I could expose my child to several languages while I refreshed my knowledge of Spanish, Italian and French and my husband refreshed his memory of how to speak German.

Review of the Learn a Language DVD

Teaching languages with visuals is important to helping kids learn. I liked that the video highlighted the objects it was talking about to help emphasize the vocabulary word’s meaning. When I took an English Language Learner class in graduate school at Vanderbilt University, I learned strategies for language acquisition that included visuals as well as song. Even when the video wasn’t using song, it had a nice rhythm with sound effects to help emphasize words. I felt that the sounds helped catch my daughter’s attention and engage her to encourage her achievement in language acquisition.

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While my daughter watched the video, I could tell she enjoyed seeing the characters she had met in previous educational films made by the company. Easily I switched from language to language. Including such a range of languages was a smart move by the company. I liked that I expanded my vocabulary so I could converse in different languages with my daughter. I had never previously formally studied Mandarin Chinese, although I had spent some time in China, and I felt that I was learning a lot as an adult.

Although some people may argue that a video can’t teach a child language, I remember years ago when my daughter barely spoke English words yet when she randomly asked me, “¿Hablas Español?,” which she had learned from a popular bilingual cartoon. Learning language from a video can be very effective. I prefer to learn the language with my daughter so we could practice translating to each other. When I took my daughter to a restaurant, I was proud to see my daughter practice her new language skills with the server and hostess. In the future, I plan to continue watching the video with my daughter to help me master the language skills as well as to give my daughter more exposure to the languages.

Visit the company’s website to learn more.

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Disclosure

I received a free product to help inform my writing.

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