News Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Unuhi Bilingual Books

August 22, 2018

3

Reading bilingual books to your children

How to read a bilingual book to your children

By Simon Greenland | News

There are many different ways to read a bilingual book and you will find the right method for you and your child. There is no right or wrong and bilingual books are there to bring the joy of storytelling to a language learning environment in a fun and interactive way.

One of the most popular methods is to read the story aloud in the child’s main language first, so that they can get to know it. Treat it like any other story book and look at the pictures, talk about the story and interact with the characters. Understanding the story in the stronger language can help the learning process of the weaker language.

Go back and read the story again, this time in the second or weaker language and then again in the first language. Don’t worry if your pronunciation isn’t quite correct in the weaker language, just have fun trying it out. The idea is to stimulate curiosity and interest in the second language. When you think you and your child are ready, you can try reading the story in the second language only. Ask them to read it with you if they are keen to try.

Above all encourage your child to have a go. Unlike adults, young children are usually not that self-conscious and this is excellent for building up confidence in a foreign language. Remember, having fun is the most important part of learning a language. Bilingual books provide a good base for this on many levels. Comparing the words, the different sounds and showing the new letters in a language’s alphabet are just a few ways to make languages fun and exciting.

If you have a unique way of reading your bilingual books, we would love to hear from you. Simply go to the help centre and send us a message.

August 22, 2018

0

A great learning aid for bilingual families

By Simon Greenland | News

Did you know?

More than half of the world’s population speaks more than one language.
Infancy and early childhood are critical periods for language development.
Current research has confirmed that bilingual children learn faster and learning a second language supports other types of learning.
Reading stories in the classroom and especially at home is emotionally and educationally important for children.
Bilingual books are ideal for teaching and learning foreign languages.

The Problem

With an increasing number of families living abroad, there is a growing need for more bilingual literature for children to support the transition from one language to another.
Parents living abroad naturally want to teach and read to a child in their mother tongue.
Traditional printed bilingual books produced by larger publishers can be expensive and hard to find in the 2 languages you may want as they are still aimed primarily at teaching English. Not much use if you are one of the 1 million Romanians living in Spain or Italy for example.
Primary school teachers are always looking for new ways to introduce children to a new language, and integrate and add cohesion between the different nationalities in the classroom.
Until now, no platform has been able to offer quality bilingual books in an extensive range of languages.

The Solution: The Unuhi App!

A dedicated bilingual app where you can read and enjoy high quality stories for children aged 3-8+ in any 2 language combinations.
Suitable for use both at school and at home with a parent.
Aiming to provide a wider choice of ethnically diverse content.
Offering affordable, easy to access content that can be downloaded and enjoyed anywhere.
We offer our first book for free, so you can try Unuhi at no cost.
You will need to be online to complete the purchase process but no internet connection is required to read the books after that.
In a world where more and more people are crossing national and linguistic borders, we want to be the trusted app for children’s bilingual books and at our core will always be the creative art of storytelling.

Why not download the Unuhi App on iOS and Android and try your first book for free? Start reading bilingual books to your children today!

A call to all authors and illustrators of children’s books.

As we continue to expand, we are looking for children’s authors and illustrators from around the world who have a desire to connect with a young, growing global audience and share their stories in all the languages that we support. Please do get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.

August 15, 2018

0

What is a bilingual book?

By Mark Bassett | News

Layout

Bilingual books are a wonderful aid to learning a second language and are particularly effective for toddlers and young children. They are sometimes referred to as ‘Dual Language Books’ or ‘Side-by-Side Books’ and have 2 different languages on the same page with the second language being a translation (comparison) of the first.

Whilst there are no rules around the typographic layout of a bilingual book, they are often seen with one language at the top and one language at the bottom, allowing the reader to compare vocabulary, language style, grammar and alphabetical characters with ease.

History

Bilingual books have been around since the 1980’s and are widely recognised as a valuable resource for parents and educators to use with children as they provide a child-friendly bridge to reading and speaking in another language.

The beauty of bilingual books is that they combine language learning with the age-old love of storytelling. What parent doesn’t love reading to their child and what child doesn’t enjoy story time!? It’s a win-win in every sense.

A bilingual book will work in any language combination and here at Unuhi we feature 20 languages which is the equivalent of almost 200 different language combinations! We are bringing bilingual books to as many kids as we can across the globe and plan to add new languages as soon as possible.

Our books are available in any combination of the following languages: English, Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin (Simplified), Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Filipino.

Benefits at home

During infancy and early childhood, children have enormous potential to learn multiple languages without too much effort. When 2 languages are spoken within the same family, parents have the opportunity to pass on their mother-tongue to their children. Some might say that there is no greater gift in life than the ability to speak a second language and bilingual books are a really helpful tool to encourage this process.

At home, reading with parents is both emotionally and educationally important for children. Story time brings back fond memories for us all. It is also one of a child’s first experiences of connecting the written and spoken word together. Bilingual books play an important part for a child being exposed to a second (or third or fourth!) language and it encourages daily use of a second language at home.

Bilingual books allow children to work simultaneously in two languages to decode unfamiliar text, negotiate meaning and explore the differences between languages. If children can read in both languages, then they should be encouraged to do so, even if one language is stronger than the other. Understanding the story in the stronger language can help them learn the weaker language.

Benefits at school

At school, teachers can read a bilingual book out loud in the school language while parents read the same book out loud at home in their language. Did you know that parents who read to their children in a home language can actually help strengthen their children’s academic skills? That’s true even if the school language is different from the home language. When teachers select bilingual books that focus on different cultures, they are helping children feel comfortable with cultural diversity. It is a gentle way for teachers to cultivate multicultural awareness and appreciation in their students.

Make bilingual learning fun!

We know that the benefits of speaking more than one language are many. But it is important that children themselves buy into this knowledge. Bilingual books provide an opportunity to have fun with language.

The goal is to help children embrace all of their languages so that as they grow they will be able to use these languages with confidence and pleasure in the many multilingual and multicultural situations in which they will find themselves. Reading and enjoying bilingual books is one great way to help our children achieve this goal.

With the new iPad app from Unuhi, you will be able to enjoy reading stories in the 2 languages of your choice, making us the go-to app for fun bilingual stories for children aged 3-8+.