Bonita Cinderella - Teaching Children Foreign Languages through Fairy Tales

by Lauren Nemec

An American writer named David Burke has developed a unique foreign language learning program for children. Concerned by Americans' lack of foreign language skills, Burke developed a line of children's books that teach children new foreign words in every book. The article, "US Writer David Burke Teaches Language Through Fairy Tales", offers an example from the instruction CD to illustrate how the books read:

"Once upon a time, there lived a poor girl - nuhaizi - named Cinderella who was very pretty - pioaliang. The nuhaizi, who was very piaoliang, lived in a small house - fangzi…."

So far, the books are available from English into Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian and Japanese and from Spanish, Korean and Japanese into English.

I think this is a great idea, mostly because fairy tales are so universal. In the Czech Republic, for example, you can see Czech fairy tales portrayed on television during every national holiday. Czech children watch their Czech fairy tales on Saturday mornings with the same wide-eyed excitement as American children watching a Disney fairy tale. Though the tales may vary from country to country, the basic themes, plots and characters are usually the same.

Perhaps fun tools like these books will make children more eager to learn foreign languages and help them connect easily to other cultures.

You can visit David Burke's website at slangman.com to learn more about him and order these books. Here's a man as animated as his fairy tales...