If you are interested in encouraging your young child to learn a language, good for you! All the evidence shows that the great window of learning starts at birth and closes up around the ages of ten to twelve (which is just the time when the education system begins to offer a foregin language to schoolchildren — I was in seventh grade when I started to formally learn Spanish, and it was already too late for me).
Children that young are incredibly open to learning different ways of saying the same thing, and most don’t have trouble moving from one to the other. Since we are Italian-Americans, we wanted our children to learn Italian. So we decided to try a program that has received a lot of praise.
Muzzy is a very popular language program for young children. It’s a total immersion program: it comes with a video, an audio cassette tape, and a CD-ROM. The video animation package tells the story of some mythical kingdom: we are introduced to the king, the queen, the princess, the gardener (with whom the princess is in love and vice versa), the king’s advisor Corvax (who is also in love with the princess and jealous of the gardener), and of course Muzzy, an outer-space adventurer.
The language program itself seems very interesting – you are immersed in the one language, watching the events and having visuals to explain all the various terms: adjectives, times of day, even verb constructions. Interspersed with the narrative are little sketches involving “real-life” circumstances: eating at a restaurant, answering a phone call, explaining what one does on certain days of the week, etc. Our oldest like the video a lot and we often listened to the audio cassette in the car. But there was something we did not like about the story of Muzzy that was told.
In our view there were certain reinforcements of stereotypes that we found offensive. The queen is jovial and fat, and since we were learning the Italian language, it was part of the stereotype of such a woman (though obviously in our families we have known a few such women, we also have many thin grandmas, too). And while the other characters in the kingdom look like friendly cartoon animals, Corvax has ugly green skin, wears black, and has a super-long nose. The story line does seem to tell a nice tale of how those in a social class should overcome prejudice – the king is opposed to the romance between the gardener and the princess, but when he and Muzzy save the day from Corvax’s foolishness, he agrees to let the gardener marry the princess – but at the same time it equates that which is beautiful with good and that which is ugly with evil. And I wonder if there’s some subtle racism at work in having the villain have that long nose (I am not Jewish, but I wonder if my Jewish friends would see it the way I do). There’s that assumption that if you are a bad guy you look bad. And I know that such iconography is probably okay enough for children, to learn the world in black and white, we were not comfortable with what we saw as an offensive stereotype. Muzzy of course would seem to be an exception to this, since he is a big furry monster-type, but even though he is big he is clearly marked from early on as lovable, the way that Sully is so marked in “Monsters, Inc.” He is the central character, who helps makes sure the two true lovers are united in the end, despite the machinations of Corvax. We could not work out the various contradictions we saw in the story.
When we sent the package back to the distributor of the series in the States, we wrote a letter explaining all this, but we never got any kind of response from the company to our concerns, which we felt were legitimate. Our oldest does pick up language quickly – as evidenced by Dora the Explorer, of course – and she took a short after-school program when she went to Montessori last year, which she loved. But we need some more immersion for her and her sister (who was not born when we tried out the Muzzy program). I was looking at the program again, and I am actually thinking about ordering it again. But I want to think long and hard about it.
Of course we are also trying to find the money to take a trip to Italy, to visit with family! Now THAT’s total immersion.
Here’s the link to the Early Advantage company, which sells the Muzzy program in the US, Canada, and Europe.
http://www.early-advantage.com/about_muzzy/