Little Pim Unboxing with Shonduras

We were so excited when Shaun McBride, aka Shonduras, a Snapchat celebrity and popular YouTube daily vlogger who was recently listed in Forbes Top 30 under 30 and his wife, Jenny McBride accepted our request to send Baby Adley (his adorable daughter) Little Pim language learning products in Spanish. Since Shaun spent some time in Honduras, hence his nickname of 'Shonduras,' and learned the Spanish language through immersion, we felt that he would want to the same for his child, and we were right on! Baby Adley already knows a few words in Spanish and is excited to learn more with the help of Little Pim. Check out Baby Adley opening her custom Little Pim package in Shonduras' daily vlog below:

The contents of her custom care package included:

• Little Pim Spanish (Vol 1 and 2) on an Amazon Kindle Fire Kids Edition
• Little Pim Trilingual Board Books
• Little Pim Spanish Words and Phrases Flash Cards
• Custom-printed Little Pim Coloring Book with Crayons
• "Say Hello" Poster
• Little Pim Plush Panda Bear

Order Your Spanish for Kids Complete Set to Start Learning Today!

Infographic: The Benefits of Early Language Learning

Below is an infographic on some of the many benefits of teaching kids a second language at the age they learn best which is before the age of six. Give a child the gift of a second language and watch it pay off over a lifetime! Share this infographic with parents and teachers and explore more of the benefits of bilingualism on our website.

Brain Research: The Benefits of Bilingualism

Growing up knowing more than one language offers many benefits. Just knowing the language is the most obvious one, but the benefits extend to the way we think. An article on the NPR website by Anya Kamenetz, "6 Potential Brain Benefits of Bilingual Education," discusses these advantages. The article focuses on non-English speakers learning English, but English speakers who pick up a foreign language benefit too. The younger they start, the better, but children of all ages stand to sharpen their minds.

Keeping two languages separate in their heads exercises brain skills. The bilingual student has to know when to use one language, and when to use the other. Developing this skill helps in task switching, and spotting the social cues promotes empathy.

Another big benefit is "metalinguistic awareness" — the understanding of how language works. Learning more than one language means learning there's more than one way to say things. They learn about different ways to put words and ideas together. German doesn't have a word for "mind," but that's only because it doesn't draw the sharp distinction among "spirit," "mind," and "sense" that English does. That didn't stop Jung and Freud from going deep into the study of psychology.

A study at American University found that dual-language students outperformed English-only ones on reading. They could pull as much meaning out of sentences as students with better English skills but no foreign-language skills. They generally knew fewer English words, but their awareness of language made up for it.

The benefits may extend into old age. Kamenetz cites a Canadian study which finds that bilingual people with Alzheimer's disease don't suffer from cognitive impairment as early as monolingual ones. This could be because bilingualism gives a "cognitive reserve" that makes up for loss of brain function.

Learning a second language is a great way to expand a child's understanding of the world. Visit our website to learn how children can learn languages through Little Pim.

Bilingual Baby: When is the Best Time to Start?

The benefits of introducing your baby to another language are well documented. In our rapidly globalizing society, knowing a second (or third) language provides an obvious edge over the competition in the job market.

But, what about its impact on childhood development? While some would suggest that over-exposure to foreign language may cause delay in speaking, this assumption is both unproven and outweighed by the benefits dual-language babies experience as they grow.

We know the many benefits, so the question soon becomes: “When do we start?”

The answer is surprising. According to an article by the Intercultural Development Research Association, it may be most beneficial to begin second language exposure before six months of age. In a study by psychologist Janet Werker, infants as young as four months of age successfully discriminated syllables spoken by adults in two different languages. Dr. Werker’s work also determined a possible decline in foreign language acquisition after 10 months of age. To give your child their best start, you must begin early.

How is this so? The answer can be found in the complex world of the human brain. Our brains react uniquely to language learning at any age, even growing when stimulated by another language. While mankind can acquire a language at mostly any stage, it is exceptionally difficult to do so outside of childhood. From infancy to age five, the brain is capable of rapid language acquisition. Even so, there are varying degrees of acquisition, even for children. After six months of age, infants begin distinguishing the differing sounds of their native tongue and others. Beyond six months, exposing your little one to a brand new language will pose a challenge.

That is not to say that teaching your two year-old French is a bad idea! It is merely to say that the earlier you begin teaching your child, the better.

Though most babies wont utter their first words before eleven months of age, they develop complex mental vocabularies through the piecing together of “sound maps.” As they gather from what they are exposed to, an infant who hasn’t been immersed in another language during this delicate stage will not piece together adequate sound maps to differentiate another language.

The reason for this is rooted in the brain at birth. Children are born with 100 billion brain cells and the branching dendrites that connect them. The locations that these cells connect are called synapses; critical components in the development of the human brain. These synapses are thought to “fire” information from one cell to another in certain patterns that lead to information becoming “hardwired” in the brain. The synapses transmit information from the external senses to the brain via these patterns, thus causing the brain to interpret them, develop, and learn from them. From birth to age three, these complex synapses cause infants to develop 700 neural connections per second.

These synapses are critical in sound mapping, and at the age of six months, the infant brain has already begun to “lock in” these new patterns and has difficulty recognizing brand new ones. This is because although your baby is born with all of the neurons they’ll ever need, that doesn’t mean that they’ll “need” all 100 billion. Infancy to the age of three is filled not only with rapid neural expansion, but also with neural “pruning;” a process in which unnecessary connections are nixed and others are strengthened.

Exactly which connections are pruned and which are cultivated is partially influenced by a child’s environment. Synapses are cultivated or pruned in order of importance to ensure the easiest, most successful outcome possible for a functioning human being. If a function is not fostered during this stage, it is likely that the neural connections associated with it will fade. For the brain to see a skill as important, you must make it important.

To put it plainly, if you only speak to your child in English, the infant brain sees no reason to retain a neural pathway regarding the little Mandarin it has heard. Babies learn about their environment at every age and are internally motivated from birth to do so. Your baby wants to learn and does so by exploring and mimicking the world around them. They’re entirely capable of building a complex knowledge of Mandarin, Arabic, or Italian. So, why not feed their mind and start now?

Easy Ways to Introduce a New Language

You might find yourself overwhelmed by all the information and advice on how to introduce a new language to your child. There are many products out there, but your child’s best teacher is You! These tips will help you get comfortable introducing the new language:

Keep it simple One of the best ways to integrate a new language is by using it during your simple daily tasks. Babies and toddlers are constantly learning about the world around them. Using a second language during your bed or bath time routines is a perfect way to ease into your new bilingual journey.

Have the whole family join in The more you use the preferred second language, the faster your child will pick it up. Encourage others in your family, adults and older children, to use the language too. Use holiday and family dinners as a platform to keep introducing the second language.

Repeat, repeat, repeat Learning a new language is all about repetition. You might start feeling like a parrot but it will pay off! As your child gets older, they might choose to only speak in English, no worries, just make sure that you repeat back what they said in the language you are trying to introduce. Repetition in your daily life is a great tool that will have great results.

Make it fun Raising bilingual children should be fun. Play games, sing songs and embrace the silliness of it all. Keeping it fun is very important because making mistakes is a part of learning and you want your child to not feel discouraged. You can get more specific and learn traditional games and songs.

Little Pim offers great easy-to-use language learning products that you can integrate into your family life. Your child can start watching our award-winning series today! Get started on a fun, life-long journey!

Your Baby CAN be Bilingual

Experts around the globe agree that language learning begins at a young age. Adults that attempt to learn a new language often struggle, whereas small children have the unique ability to latch on to multiple languages at a time. However, many parents face a dilemma when it comes to the decision of exactly when a child's exposure to another language should begin. It's a topic that poses many valid questions among parents and educators: "When should I begin teaching my child a second (or third) language?"

"Should I wait until they can talk?"

"Should I wait until they've mastered English?"

"Will exposing them to too many languages at once cause communication difficulties later on?"

Science has shown us the answer, and it's groundbreaking. Babies can learn multiple languages at a time and have no delay in language development as a result. In fact, beginning multilingual exposure in infancy may give your child an edge over their peers later on. Oral vocabulary is critical for children as they achieve literacy in any language, which doubles when a child is fluent in more than one language.

A University of Washington study determined that children exposed to other languages during the first year of life fared better in preschool due in part to the fact that their vocabularies were greatly increased. The bilingual children in the study were shown to understand written language at an earlier age than their peers.

Children should be exposed to multilingualism as early as possible. 6-month-old babies can understand spoken language with great clarity. Infants as young as 7 months can understand and keep their languages separate. As children reach a verbal age, they commonly mix languages together, but this is not at all a bad thing. It is a common occurrence in young and old bilinguals alike, called "code switching." Code switching is an almost universal step for children as they learn to verbalize multiple languages correctly. Children that mix their languages do so only temporarily, whereas adults that learn later in life commonly struggle with it.

You can teach your child several languages at once without "damaging" them in any way. Considering that over 60% of the world population is multilingual in some way, it's easy to see that human beings are hardwired to know more than one from the start.

Learn more about the benefits and how to raise your children to be bilingual at Mom Loves Best.

Read the full Mom Loves Best blog post on “How Your Child Can Benefit From Being Bilingual” by Jenny Silverstone for more helpful tips and information.

Here at Little Pim, we have many products that encourage language immersion from an early age. Do you have any little polygots running around? If so, let us know in the comments below!

Outstanding Information on Teaching Your Child Another Language

Teaching your child a second, or even third language, is exciting, stimulating, and fun, not to mention an experience that will bring you and your child closer. Moreover, the best part is you will be doing a great service for your child. Approximately, two-thirds of the world is bilingual and in the United States alone, the number of children who speak a language other than English has increased to 21 percent. The benefits of learning another language are well documented; a few of the benefits include:

• - Increased intelligence
• - More fluent verbal skills
• - Greater memory ability
• - Problem-solving savvy
• - Improved cognitive skills
• - Better reading/writing skills
• - Larger worldview

As a parent, you may have a lot of questions about how, where, or when to begin the journey of introducing your child to a new language. Let’s look at a few of the questions parents have.

When is the best time to teach my child?

Research shows that babies and toddlers are prime age for teaching a second language. As astonishing as it sounds, the brain of the baby is wired for learning a language. The sounds of the language are as a pattern to the brain, which acts in ways similar to a computer – coding and decoding the symbols of sound and storing it into the memory. Before the age of six years old is ideal.

How can I possibly teach my child another language when I don’t know the language?

This is probably the biggest concern and hold back for a lot of parents, but with immersion-style videos, books, and entertaining material, your baby can begin learning the language whether you know it or not. Actually, you will learn right along with your child. Engaging videos are a must to attract the attention of the small child. Our Entertainment Immersion Method® engages a child’s natural love of play and learning through repetition. Colorful books to touch, upbeat music, and flashcards all work to reinforce the language.

Where can I find a program that will effectively teach my child another language?

At Little Pim, we have developed a highly-visual, language-learning program that children fall in love with. One reason our program is effective is children can relate to their “teacher,” which happens to be the delightful, animated Little Pim panda bear. The books and videos host the adorable panda so children come to know and love the little bear. They will look forward to learning. One child’s parent is quoted as saying her son “loves the animations of Little Pim and often asks to watch them over and over again. He loves to yell the words he knows…”

Teaching your child a second language has never been more fun. Choose from our 12 language sets to watch a free preview of Little Pim today!

Differences Between Brazilian and European Portuguese

Portuguese is one of the most beautiful, romantic, Latin languages. As the sixth most spoken mother tongue in the world, Portuguese is an excellent choice for your toddler or preschooler.Speaking Portuguese, even if you have no ties to the language and culture, is a marketable skill that will serve your child well in the future.

As with English, the country where the language is learned and spoken makes a lot of difference in words, pronunciation, and grammar. The Portuguese spoken in Brazil is so different from European Portuguese that it is often referred to as Brasileiro, according to the website Lexiophiles.

There are many reasons for these differences and here are two of the most obvious ones.

Cultural Influence

In Brazilian Portuguese American Indian tribal languages donated many of the words for local foods, plants, and animals, as well as other objects. These words are unknown to speakers of European Portuguese.

Italian, French, and African languages such as Yoruba, have also found their way into Brasileiro. These add a significant contribution to the vocabulary of Brazilian Portuguese that does not exist in European Portuguese.

Intonation and Cadence

Brasileiro is more musical or lyrical than European Portuguese. Vowels are more open than those in European Portuguese and to English speakers, European Portuguese can sound somewhat muffled.  Brasileiro is syllable-timed like Spanish with equal stress on all syllables. And European Portuguese is stress-timed, with stressed and unstressed syllables in words, which is more familiar to native English speakers.

Little Pim’s language courses for young children make learning Portuguese an exciting, playful, and educational experience for your child. She will learn 180 Portuguese words and phrases to start her on a lifelong path of bilingualism. Browse our website for more information on Portuguese language learning for your child.

New Brain Studies Indicate Early Childhood is the Best Time to Learn a New Language

It's proven that the best time to learn a new language is under the age of 6. New studies from the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences indicate "the notion that not only are very young children capable of learning multiple languages, but that early childhood is the optimum time for them to begin."

In the video below, research scientist and the study's lead author, Naja Ferjan Ramirez summarizes the results from the brain studies performed on sixteen 11-month-old babies, half raised in bilingual homes and the other half in monolingual homes:

[iframe id="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TAYhj-gekqw" align="center" autoplay="no"]

Our results suggest that before they even start talking, babies raised in bilingual households are getting practice at tasks related to executive function. This suggests that bilingualism shapes not only language development, but also cognitive development more generally, said Ramirez.

It's amazing to see the results from the brain-recording technique used in the study called magnetoencephalography. "The brains of bilingual babies were specialized to process the sounds of both languages, Spanish and English. The brains of babies from monolingual families were specialized to process the sounds of English and were not sensitive to Spanish," says Ramirez. No surprise there!

What's more interesting is that as early as 11 months old, we're able to see that the bilingual brains showed increased activity in areas related to executive functioning. According to The Center on The Developing Child at Harvard University, when children have the opportunity to develop cognitive skills early on, individuals and society experience lifelong benefits.

Executive function and self-regulation skills are the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully....Providing the support that children need to build these skills at home, in early care and education programs, and in other settings they experience regularly is one of society’s most important responsibilities.

Are you ready to teach your little ones a new language? Check out the research behind our method to learn more about how we integrate scientific studies like these to help kids effectively learn languages, both native and foreign.

Limited Time Offer! Save 20% on Little Pim with code KIDS

What's Trending in Bilingualism

We've scoured the web to find breaking news and information in the world of Bilingualism. Check out our 5 favorite stories, below:

1. Taking bilingualism to the bank: In the Economist, bilingualism comes down to dollars and cents in, What is a Foreign Language Worth? The article looks at actual ROI (return on investment) for bilingual employees. While these numbers are lower than others comparisons we’ve seen, we found it interesting that you can expect being bilingual in German to increase your lifetime additional earnings by nearly three times that of Spanish. Will Goethe become more popular with the preschool set now?

2.Little Pim in the News: Our own Julia Pimsleur Levine, founder and CEO of Little Pim, is featured on Forbes this week in How to Speak Entrepreneur Like a Native. If you’ve ever wondered how Little Pim started, this is a great read. If you’re interested in hearing from Julia first hand about her entrepreneurial endeavors, her personal Forbes blog is here.

3. Kids bop to bilingual pop: It was only a matter of time before pop songs embraced the budding bilingual kids’ market. From the same producer who created the earwig “Friday” song by Rebecca Black, comes a Chinese/English song, “Get in My Car” sung by 10-yr-old Grace Liu. http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/5930503/10-year-old-grace-liu-wants-you-to-get-in-my-car-watch

4. “Hear and I forget, see and I remember” – National Geographic explores why it’s easier to remember new lessons, including a second language, when you use visual and tactile lessons---like Little Pim’s videos and books---and not just audible ones.

5. Say what? According to a New Zealand study, babies can actually make distinctions between words spoken in foreign languages.