Recapture the delights of hearing stories beautifully told by extraordinarily talented storytellers and bilingual audio books benefits : As you learn new words and phrases while reading your e-book, compile a vocabulary list or add to the one you’re already curating. Vocabulary lists are a language learner’s best friend. They can go anywhere and are perfect for filling up empty minutes spent waiting in line or on your lunch break. I carry vocabulary lists everywhere!
Did you know that a woman by the name of Pura Belpre was New York City’s first Puerto Rican librarian? She came to the U.S. in 1921, carrying the cuentos folkloricos (folktales) of her homeland. She found work as a bilingual assistant, where she retold those stories from Puerto Rico. Today, generations of children and storytellers continue to share her tales and celebrate her legacy. In honor of this new story, we’ve put together a few reasons why we think it’s beneficial to read bilingual stories and diverse voices to your children.
The street epistemology teaches us how to do so. It consists partly in pushing the interlocutor to ask himself questions. The questions we ask ourselves do not meet the defensive stubbornness that questions asked by a third party meet. This audio guide is bilingual: that is, it presents itself as a language learning tool. The title indicates that it is a parody of the practical guides. A “serious” guide would not be concerned about helping the guru to build his enterprise. Because this bilingual audio book is often fun, offering it to a member-of-a-cult friend, or relative, is not perceived as a threat, or as a criticism of his choices. Read more details on Bilingual audio books – How to create your cult.
If money is available for purchasing audiobooks, it is important for librarians and teachers to do their homework before buying. Single-author unabridged audiobooks tend to be the best, though some dramatizations (such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, read by the author with a cast of more than 40 British actors) can be excellent. There are many sources of audiobook reviews readily available online, including School Library Journal. [Note: The Association for Library Service for Children also publishes an annual Notable Children’s Recordings list.]
The children listened…. and their parents too. Listening was not felt as a chore but as a delight. So, we decided to prepare bilingual audiobooks from “classical” works. Then, we thought we should publish contemporary short works in at least 2 languages (by the way, if you are the happy author of a work up to 25.000 words, prepare to submit it.) We propose mostly human voices, because to listen to synthetic voices feels… synthetic. But, whatever their accent, the synthetic voices offer a faultless pronunciation, which is important for the student. So, we prepare some sound files with synthetic voices. Read even more details at Language Learning.