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A New (Bilingual) Generation
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Growing up bilingual, says Julia Pimsleur Levine, was the greatest gift her parents could have given her. Through immersion and play, they taught her to speak French fluently by the time she was 6 years old. Pimsleur Levine's father, Dr. Paul Pimsleur, was a language professor whose research focused on language acquisition. He spoke seven languages fluently. His passion, says Pimsleur Levine, was "making foreign language learning easy and accessible for everybody."
Being fluent in another language "opened up so many opportunities," says Pimsleur Levine. "Culturally, I traveled in French speaking countries and had enriching experiences there. Educationally and professionally, I went to one of the top private schools in New York and was admitted to Yale. I don't know if it was entirely because I was bilingual, but it certainly made me stand out."
Pimsleur Levine later attended film school in France, living and working there for many years. "That's probably one of the things I'm happiest with in my life," she says, "that I have access to this whole other culture."
The Next Generation
When Pimsleur Levine became a mother, she wanted the same bilingual advantages for her own son that she has always enjoyed. She began teaching him French at home, taking him to language classes, and sharing French language books and CDs with him. When she tried to find entertaining foreign language videos to share with him, though, she found the market sorely lacking.
At the time, she recalls, "there were only a couple of videos that professed to teach a foreign language and none of them was designed for young children. Some of them marketed themselves for 1 to 12 year olds. You don't need to have children to realize that's too broad a span." Frustrated that the few educational French language videos she did find didn't engage her son, then 2, she decided to create her own series of language DVDs for young children, Little Pim. As a documentary film maker, a language instructor and a mom, she says, "I have pretty high standards."
The Little Pim Difference
So what is it that sets Little Pim apart? First and foremost, says Pimsleur Levine, it's Little Pim himself. The main character in all Little Pim DVDs is a bubbly, welcoming Panda named Little Pim.
"The most important thing to me was that I wanted language learning to be as much fun as anything else they could be watching," she says. "My son loved Elmo on Sesame Street, so my initial goal was to create a character who's as much fun and as engaging as Elmo." Pimsleur Levine describes Little Pim as "part Curious George, part Bugs Bunny and part Elmo." It seems to be working. She regularly gets email from customers who say their children are constantly asking to watch Little Pim.
"To me that's the greatest sign of success," she says. "No child is going to go tug on their parent's skirt and say, 'I want to learn Chinese.' If they like to watch Little Pim and if it's engaging to them, they'll sit and watch it and that's really all they need to do. It's really easy for them to gain the benefits of foreign language exposure at that young age."
The DVDs focus on themes that are especially meaningful to very young children, including eating and drinking, waking up and going to bed, and playtime. While Little Pim's young audience is, for the most part, not yet reading, the DVDs include subtitles, phonetic when appropriate, so parents who aren't bilingual can reinforce the vocabulary while watching the DVDs and throughout the day.
"Our mission is to make foreign language learning easy, fun and accessible for children everywhere," she says. "Part of the accessible piece is that we're very careful that all of our DVDs can be used by parents who don't speak the foreign language."
The Benefits of Bilingualism
It's become widely accepted that exposing children to foreign languages at an early age offers a vast array of benefits. While parents used to worry that children might become confused if they were exposed to foreign languages before they mastered English, research has shown that foreign language instruction can strengthen young children's vocabularies in their native tongues and give them a better understanding of how language works.
Research also has shown that if a child is not exposed to the unique sounds of a language at an early age, his brain will lose the ability to recognize and recreate those sounds. That's why people who learn languages later in life very often have trouble perfecting their accents. Children who were exposed to more than one language early in life also tend to read earlier, score higher on standardized tests, and demonstrate higher capacities for foreign language acquisition throughout their lives when compared to their peers who were exposed only to English.
These days, adds Pimsleur Levine, we live in an increasingly global community and our children are aware of that from a very early age. "They just turn on the TV and they've got Dora the Explorer speaking Spanish and Ni Hao, Kai-Lan speaking Chinese and Daddy's going back and forth to Singapore to check on the company," she says. "I think kids have an awareness of the world outside their borders from a young age that we might not have had as kids. And then of course parents are more motivated to introduce foreign language because they see how the economy is so global and, especially with the recession, I think we're realizing that a foreign language might be more of a necessary tool than a luxury."
Pimsleur Levine began the Little Pim series in 2006 with French, Spanish and Chinese. She soon added English/English as a Second Language (ESL), and in early 2009 introduced Japanese, Italian and Hebrew. By the end of 2009 the catalog will include Russian, German and Arabic.
The First Step
Pimsleur Levine's eldest son, now 4, speaks French well, and his little brother, not yet 2, loves watching Little Pim, but Pimsleur Levine doesn't see the DVDs as a stand-alone language program. "It doesn't replace classes or other involvement," she says. "My main goal is to be a child's first introduction to a foreign language and to make it fun."
Even if your child doesn't become bilingual at an early age, exposing him to world languages through Little Pim's engaging DVDs will benefit him in many ways. With enough exposure, his brain will retain the neurological connections necessary to recognize and create the unique sounds of the foreign languages you share, and he'll likely develop an awareness of the world's diversity that many children don't develop until much later. Best of all, you'll ensure his first experience with world languages is an enjoyable one.
"Too many people start learning a foreign language at 12 or 13 and they hate it," says Pimsleur Levine, "and then it's really hard to learn. ...I'm trying to carry on my father's legacy by making language fun for a whole new generation of kids."
For more information about the benefits of early multilingual education, read First Words, Second Languages.
For more ideas about how to introduce your little ones to world languages, read Is Your Baby Multilingual?
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