Customer Reviews

Professor Parrot's Sound Beginnings (Languages and Music of the World) (Spanish Edition)

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In the book The Bilingual Edge: Why, When, and How to Teach Your Child a Second Language the authors, who are linguistic professors, say that all normal hearing children are born with the ability to hear the different subtle sounds in different languages. But around the age of ten months that ability to hear differences in sounds starts to decline. So, it makes sense that exposing your child to different languages should help to keep that ear open. Professor Parrot's Sound Beginnings seems like a good way to do that for those of us who do not have multiple languages spoken in the home.
Professor Parrot's Sound Beginnings is a two CD set. The first CD has Spanish, French, German and Japanese. The second has Chinese, English, Hebrew and Russian. Each language is spoken for 15 minutes with background music that reflects that country's traditional music. It is not a fun CD but it certainly accomplishes the goal of exposing your child to the sounds of multiple languages.
Don't buy this CD if you are hoping to use it to teach your child a language. If that is your goal, you are better off buying something from the Baby's First Word Series, like Baby's First Words in Spanish (Baby's First Words) or Baby's First Words in Chinese (Baby's First Words). My only complaint about these CDs are that there are two of them. It would have been more convenient to be able to just put in one CD and get to hear all eight languages.
Dr. Jenn Berman
www.DoctorJenn.com
Author of The A to Z Guide to Raising Happy, Confident Kids

Don't be mislead into thinking that your baby will become fluent in eight languages by age 2 just by playing these CDs.

According to some researchers, newborns have the ability to distinguish the subtle nuances of any of the world's spoken languages, but they eventually lose this ability around 10 months of age. Therefore, constantly exposing a newborn to a language not spoken at home will reinforce the baby's retention of sounds specific to the language. Much later, the child could theoretically learn to speak like a native speaker of the language. The premise behind this product is that if you play the two CD's to your newborn constantly, then your baby can grow up with the ability to speak eight languages without accents. I think this is overkill. It's unlikely that a child will grow up to speak two languages, let alone eight. I believe it's much more effective to focus on a single foreign language from birth. The "Living Language Baby's First Words" series is a much better product.

There are no printed materials included with the product. You can however download the transcripts of the CDs from the publisher's website and also listen to demos: http://www.professorparrot.com I'm fluent in one the foreign languages (Chinese) on the CD and can say that this product does not provide coverage of all the sounds in Chinese. The only value this product might have is that it includes some rare languages like Russian and Hebrew in which there are much fewer instructional products.

I am a believer in allowing infants to listen to the various sounds of different languages. In no way do I think a CD like this will teach my child 8 languages, but I do believe that hearing other languages may allow him to pick up languages easier in the future. And another bonus is that I played this CD constantly in the car during the first 6 months of his life, and if he was quiet and I plaued this, he would instantly calm down.