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La Mother Tongue is my medium to share the joys and challenges of being a new parent as well as to share how we make a conscious effort in our daily life to bring baby up bilingual.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

The Sequel Part III of Mi Madre is un Language Nerdo: Repeating Frase en Inglés from DVDs

I’ve discussed before in an earlier post how Sofía repeats the vocabulary in English when she is watching Baby Signing Times. I couldn’t be sure that she actually knew the vocab or was just repeating what she heard. Now I know. She has continues to repeat, on a regular basis, what she hears on the DVDs. Lately, much to my chagrin, she will say them with her signs IN CONTEXT! So while she is eating lunch, she will sign “eat” and say, “eat”. I praise her and say, something like, “That’s right, it’s comer.” All this is said en Español of course. (I suppose it never hurts to remind everyone that we only communicate en Español en our casa.)
It was then that I decided to check out the Signing Times DVDs that have been dubbed en Español. Signing Times is the series that follows Baby Signing Times. I’m not sure what to expect. I contacted them and they investigated a little bit for me to find out some questions I had. The intro to the vocab etc…is all done en español, but the songs are NOT translated, they remain en Inglés. We are going to give it a try and see how it works.

2 comments:

  1. Are you concerned about the dubbing? With a child that age, I'm curious about the mouth not matching the sounds. I don't know how much of learning to talk is watching as well as hearing or if that could be confusing. Obviously hearing is tantamount, but children learn from many cues. I *personally* find dubbing distracting (I prefer subtitles), but I may be an aberration. :-)

    If she's beginning to talk sans signs, you might consider going with a spanish-language educational DVD of some sort instead. In my experience (which is limited to two children), once they begin talking a lot, the signs disappear rapidly anyway. Of course, you may have knowledge of studies that indicate things other than my (limited) observances!

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  2. Hey!! Sorry I am so late in getting back to you on this. I was behind in posting originally. Some of your concerns are things that I myself dealt with about the dubbing, but I decided to just see what it looks like. I wrote on NOV 29 a small review about the Spanish version. I hate dubbing too, but I figure there are kids all over Latin America who grow up with much of their tv and movies dubbed that it must not be THAT detrimental on their develpment. I wish I could find good educational dvd in Spanish for Sofia. Either it isn't very educational or the language aspect of it is horrible. Right now, all she watches is the signing times series, so her tv is still limited. I tried a Plaza Sesamo once and she just wasn't into it...which I was secretly glad about since I really dont' want her watching anymore TV---a battle I know I will lose very soon! Maybe a certain TV producer Techy Guru should take on this task!! Ha ha ha!!

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