Recent industry news suggests that apps may be the key to raising multi-lingual offspring. What’s the real story?

I was intrigued by an article that came across my news alerts: “Six-Year Old Girl on Track to Learn 4^th Language,” published on iPadNewsTracker.

The short report mentions a family where the young children (3 and 6 years old) are already trilingual, and implies that they have become fluent in Spanish and French through 10-minute, play-oriented activities.

Now the family wants to tackle Mandarin Chinese, and has developed an iPhone/iPad app called “Princesses Learn Chinese” to help them all on the venture.

It’s funny how the techie news stories about the new app leave out an extremely important fact, made clear by the family in a blog post published on Moms with Apps:

“My wife is from Spain, I am from France, and we met in the United States. Elena and Pablo, our children, are 6 and 3 years old. My wife speaks to them exclusively in Spanish, I use only French, and they learn English at school.”

Games or no games, apps or no apps, this is a family that already has everything going for them in the “raising trilingual children” department.

Quick games and digital programs, can certainly help open up a child’s mind and language learning processes, but are not sufficient to make them truly bi/tri or quadrilingual.

The parents in question make that clear: “We believe that an app will not replace a teacher or parents when it comes to language learning.”

Betty Carlson

See Also

• Language Translation, Inc.
  A leading language translation and interpretation service provider for more than 20 years.