Recapture the delights of hearing stories beautifully told by extraordinarily talented storytellers and audio books advantages : Try to choose at least some books that have more idiomatic language to increase your ability to know and use lingo appropriately. One way to do this is to choose contemporary titles rather than classics. It’s more likely that a current bestseller set in the present will contain more current idioms than a book written in the last century! Classics are still a great way to go with bilingual texts, especially since they tend to be so widely translated and easier to find in bilingual format—just make sure to mix it up a bit.
You don’t have to look any farther than the success of Dora the Explorer to know that bilingual media is popular with young children. Aside from popularity, bilingual storytelling offers many benefits to kids. The new book, Planting Stories: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpre, tells the story of one of the first champions of bilingual literature. Prime language learning occurs between the ages of 2 and 5.
Without attacking any church in particular, it spares none; it is more particularly directed towards the current attitudes and beliefs in the West, even if it is not limited to it. Throughout the chapters the apprentice guru learns how to find his revelation, or how to make prophecies and miracles, etc. Of course, the future guru also learns to do what every cult leader does with talent: how to shear the flock. If your church scores more than 3 positives, run away before drinking the Kool-Aid. The linguistic level is not high first because the audio book uses mainly the present of the indicative, then because the religious vocabulary varies very little from one language to another. And, I should say, from one religion to another. See more info on Bilingual books – How to create your cult.
Even with all the benefits of audiobooks, however, they are not for all students. For some, the pace may be too fast or too slow. For others, the narrator’s voice can be irritating or the use of cassette or CD players can be cumbersome when compared to the flexibility of the book. But the majority of students will find listening to well-narrated, quality literature to be a transformative experience. Varley (2002) states, “If one thing has struck me about the way people describe listening to audiobooks, it is the reported intensity of their absorption and the emotional grip of the experience. ‘They go right to your soul,’ says one listener.”
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. See extra info at Language Learning for the Blind.
