Years ago my dad was a hospital administrator at a hospital that had a lot of foreign doctors. One night my family had dinner at the home of a foreign doctor (I don’t remember what country he was from, but I believe it was somewhere around the Middle-East.) They had a daughter that I believe was 3 or 4 years old that spoke English about as well as any American child of that age. We were surprised when they told us that they only spoke English around her when they had company over. They normally spoke only their native language to her around the house. She had learned English solely from watching Sesame Street, etc.
Years later when my siblings started having kids, I found out that my ~2 year old nephew would watch Toy Story or The Lion King or both once a day. I came up with a theory. After a few months, switch the DVD settings to Spanish. My birthday presents to my sobrinos were usually DVD’s, and I only bought ones that had language tracks and subtitles in multiple languages. My siblings’ opinions were basically “use your own kids as guinea pigs.” As yet, I have no kids of my own. So this method was not tested in my family.
My question is: Has this method of teaching children other languages been tried out? If so, does it work? It seems like an easy way to let ~3 year old kids other languages. After letting them watch their favorite movie ~50 times, switch it over to Spanish. Alternately, you could turn on subtitles to help them learn to read.
Both anecdotes and links to actual studies would be appreciated.
China Bambinas watch primarily English language videos here in China. It’s part of their english input. they primarily get Mandarin and/or shanghaiese.
I could speak Japanese when I was three and four years old (when we lived in Japan). I assume I learned a bit by watching Tetsu-Jin and other cartoons.
In my travels as a foreign aid worker, it is not uncommon to meet people who speak good English from watching TV and movies. I have a guy who works with me who properly uses all kinds of slang that he picked up on TV.
I plan on doing both with my kids. I got the subtitles-to-learn-to-read idea when I was still a kid myself, and then later on the foreign-language-tracks-to-learn-that-language idea came to me, but unfortunately I’ve noticed that not a ton of movies have a foreign language track. When DVDs first came out I naively thought they all would.
Without sounding too Clintonesque, it’s going to depend on what you mean by “speak.” Can a child learn to say some things a foreign language from repeatedly watching videos in that language? Absolutely. Will the average child become fluent that way? No.
Our daughter is still only 10 months old, so she doesn’t speak any language yet, but we’re speaking to her in English (me), Mandarin Chinese (my wife), Taiwanese (grandma, when she’s visiting) and Japanese (daycare). We don’t show her TV or DVD yet, but getting English and Chinese DVDs will be part of our overall program for teaching multiple languages to her.
One of the books I’ve read on raising multilingual children says that it takes a minimum of between 15 to 20 hours of conversation per week in a particular language to become fluent in that language. The amount of effort to sustain that for most families is difficult. Many of my friends who have international marriages do not have child who are functionally bilingual. It takes considerably more work than just throwing in a DVD.
I took a few years of German in school. About 10 years after the last class, my work took me to Austria.
Now I was never really fluent, and after 10 years was pretty rusty as well.
I found that watching kids shows really helped my fluency. I could follow the news, but it was exhausting and I’d be spent halfway through a half-hour news cast. On the otherhand, I could keep up with cartoons for a couple hours at a stretch. I recall The Smurfs (Die Schnumpfen ??) being especially easy to follow.
I also tended to hang with the kids at social gatherings where the adults were not speaking english. The kids had a simpler vocabulary, spoke slower, and were used to using the hochdeutsch (versus dialect) thier teachers demanded.
I tend to hang back answering German language questions on the dope, never got real fluent, and I unknowingly got a fair amount of Wienerdialekt mixed in.
This could turen into a debate if a few linguists, (or opponents of linguistics), decide to chew over various theories of language development, but it is currently an IMHO thread, which is where you will next find it.
If this family was living in the US it’s unlikely the little girl’s sole exposure to English was TV. Unless the parents were isolating her from other children, she was likely picking up English from her playmates as well.
there are more effective ways out there like cartoons that actively teach languages rather than this passive way. i.e. muzzie, and the aforementioned sesame street
i did learn how to read chinese with closed captioning when i was 3-4. i’m a native speaker and since the characters matched up with the words, it was relatively easy to make the connections. it also helped me to learn english this way but it was harder since a) i was older (6-7), and b) i had to transition to phonetical words.
however, if you threw me in with only TV to learn a language, i would be as lost as if you dumped me in the middle of a foreign country and told me to assimilate what i could from observation alone.
I speak only English (and about 100 words of Mandarin), my wife watches Cantonese TVB serials continuously (as in upwards of 40 hours a week), even after 12 years I have not picked up any useful Cantonese.
As to captions to learn words - that only works (I think) if the captions exactly match the spoken words. For an english to chinese translation it wouldn’t work so well as the subjecrt, verb object order differs.
My personal theory is also that unless you have some sort of basic grounding watching movies doesn’t helpo. When I watch my wife’s serials for all I know they could be talking about what a great lover their neighbour is or how the neighbourhood dog barks a lot. There is no way I can learn like that.
In my experience, watching TV shows or movies can **improve **someone’s foreign language skills, but cannot **teach **them if there is no base to build on. To truly learn the language and not just expand vocabulary or reinforce grammatical rules, the child would need to have already established a base through actual, back-and-forth conversation.
I came across your old post concerning language teaching of young kids using TV programs and DVDs. Actually, I have a live example of the extreme effectiveness of this method in my own family. My own daughter who is 3 y 5 m by now, has learnt her English exactly that way: watching Cbeebies (BBC’s channel for toddlers) and cartoons on youtube. She was born in England but she was not exposed to English-speaking environment so much. I am Russian and I obviously spoke my native language to her when she was a baby. Then she spent about a year in Russia, until she was 2 y.o. When we came back to London she was staying at home with me most of the time. Our trips to the playground didn’t contributed to her communication skills in English so much as kids of that age (about 2-2.5) don’t speak so much yet. Besides, our local community which we were regularly meeting at the playground was extremely multinational. So, we had more chances to hear Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, Italian, Chinese or Japanese rather than English there. However, my daughter became very fluent in English with a natural native British accent just by regularly watching BBC kids’ programs. She also learnt numbers, letter, colors and shapes that way, without any help from my side. We moved back to Moscow in January this year and I was worried quite a lot about my daughter’s ability to sustain and develop your English language skills in the Russian speaking environment, especially that she stayed in the company of the Russian speaking granny most of the time or played with Russian kids outside. However, in spite of my worries, her English is not deteriorating but is developing in terms of grammar and vocabulary. She learnt by heart a few children stories such as Peter Rabbit, Gruffalo, A Very Hungry Caterpillar, the Tiger who came to tea, etc. She also continuously speaks English to me. So, I sincerely believe that this method of learning a foreign language deserves a better study and a wider application.
While I’ll readily concede that programming specifically for children (such as Sesame Street, or it’s foreign language counterparts) would be better, Toy Story and The Lion King are kids movies, and therefore much closer to Sesame Street than some soap opera. My thinking was 1.) It’s pretty easy to flip the language, 2.) He had watched the movie in English so many times that he knew it by heart, and 3.) The foreign language equivilants of Sesame Street aren’t as readily available as the DVD already in the player.
I think the big question is “How good are the translations?” Is it like when they dubbed Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon into English and rearranged the phrasing to make it better fit the mouth movements? Or were the translaters like “We don’t care if the lips match up with the words, we’re going to translate this accurately.”
BTW, the nephew that inspired this just turned 15.
One thing that I have heard is that English speakers who watch anime in the original Japanese often pick up a speech style that makes them sound like young girls.
