We’ve Joined the Dark Side…
Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
We bought a DVD player for our minivan. I’m not a big fan of the Boob-Tube as it is (I watch, on the average, about 10 hours of TV a month…if that), and I swore a might oath that I would never let my child rot her brain (and fatten her body) sitting in front of one. Especially not in the car.
But it’s for educational reasons!!! I promise!
We’ve got series of Spanish language DVDs coming. The car is where we’ve started listening to a bunch of different language CDs, so watching the DVDs in the car when there’s nothing else to look at sounded like an efficient use of time (not to mention keeping the Punkin’s attention whilst on the 3.5 hour trip to Memere’s, or the 9 hour trip to Grandma’s).
No, we’re not expecting the Punkin to be speaking fluent anything before she hits kindergarten (although at the rate she’s picking up vocabulary, she might surprise us). We’re just trying to keep her language pathways open to as many different sounds as possible. That way when the time comes to learn a foreign language, she’ll not struggle as badly as her parents did/do.
I love languages. Always have. But I have absolutely no ear for them. I struggled through 3 semesters of Russian, squeaking by on my written work since I usually did quite poorly on the oral exams. I can speak decent German, mostly because it’s so close to English.
Memere (my mother) tries to speak French to the Punkin (though the patois of Quebec certainly isn’t your typical classroom French.)
My hubby can handle a bit of French and German, but he is insistent that the Punkin learn Spanish. Says it’s the most useful language to have in the U.S. It’ll be real interesting trying to teach a language neither of us can speak. Maybe we’ll learn by osmosis.
But what I really want to learn is Welsh (Do you know how many Welsh albums you can download off of iTunes? I was surprised.). Or Gaelic. Perfectly useless over here in the colonies, but extremely high on the cool factor.
Or we could get some Sign Language DVDs. Just so long as I don’t try to practice while driving….