Bilingual Baby, RUSSIAN, Vol 6

Both of our children are being raised bilingual English - Russian. I was initially excited to see a developmental tape in Russian that would help us in maintaining the balance between our daughters' English and Russian. The main problem with this video is that the words spoken / visually represented are spelled on the screen in LATIN letters, TRANSLITERATED from the Cyrillic. I would note that even when I was studying Russian in school, we were forbidden from writing English - phonetic spellings - everything always had to be in Cyrillic - and I believe that this approach is still standard.

I have read a couple of books and talked to lots of parents and specialists about the best way to bring up children in a bilingual family. It was always noted that the languages should be separated to prevent them from being mixed-up in the child's mind - especially when they start to read. Since English is my native language and although I am fluent in Russian - I speak English to my daughters. My husband who is a native speaker of Russian, speaks Russian with our children. In addition to keeping literacy-related activities separate, we even keep our English books on a difference shelf than our Russian books - so that we will hopefully continue to be able to develop their reading skills separately in Russian and English, without mixing up the two alphabets, phonetics and pronunciations. So far this has worked with our children.

This video establishes an association between transliterated spellings and the spoken Russian words - this is a formula for disaster. Since this video is meant for preschoolers (ages 1-5), I am not sure what value there is in seeing the written words on the screen. If words should be spelled-out at all, they should be spelled-out in Cyrillic - so that an association between the way the words look, sound, and their meaning could be established.

I would also note that there is nothing about the video, which offers any insight into Russian culture. It seems to have been filmed in American suburbia - not a complaint, but if you expected to see or hear anything remotely Russian (other than a few words and phrases), you will be disappointed. Also, there are a number of occasions when the visuals do not match what a Russian would naturally name the object. There is simply not a one-to-one correspondence between words in difference languages in some cases, and the creators overlook this fact. I think this is minor so I won't go into the details.

So, for all of the above reasons, I could not recommend this tape to parents / others even in a situation where there was simply a desire to introduce children to foreign languages (unlike us). Perhaps other tapes in this series would work well for this purpose, assuming the creators did their homework.


A Reply from The Producers   March 5, 2002
Small Fry Productions (Alpharetta, Georgia United States)
16 out of 20 found this review helpful

We at Small Fry Productions would like to respectfully reply to the americanexpatworkingmom from Moscow, who was not pleased with this product.
The 12-volume Bilingual Baby Language Series was specifically and carefully created to introduce North American, English-speaking children to the auditory sounds and syntax of the target languages (voiced by native speakers in each language.) It is NOT designed to teach children how to read, (note the recommended age range, 1-5 years.) nor was it designed to teach the specifics of any particular culture.
There are actually 4 tapes in the series that introduce languages that do not use the Latin alphabet in their written form - Greek, Hebrew, Russian, and Japanese. We at SFP purposely used the phonetic spellings of words on each of these tapes, in order to allow the adult viewers to listen and learn along with their child, without having to know a new written language.
The packaging on these 4 Bilingual Baby videos clearly states that "words on this video appear phonetically" and also states "this video uses the phonetic spellings of the languages, rather than traditional text, in order to best assist viewers with pronouciation."
Future videos in this series will be aimed at older viewers ( ages 5+) and will include age-appropriate spelling and reading concepts. We hope this helps clear up any misunderstanding about this award-winning series of videos. We invite any customer to write to us at cservice@small-fry.com of you have any questions or comments!


Do we like this video? Da!!   January 9, 2001
4 out of 7 found this review helpful

My wife is Russian,I'm American. We want our daughter (age 10 mos.) to be bi-lingual, and we are both very happy with this tape. Anna smiles and laughs at the kids, toys, and animals she sees, and it definitely reinforces what her mother is teaching her. Thank you for making this wonderful video (this language is so hard to find!) - when is the next one going to come out? - Sincerely, Anna's "Papa"


Do we like this video? Da!!   January 9, 2001
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

My wife is Russian,I'm American. We want our daughter (age 10 mos.) to be bi-lingual, and we are both very happy with this tape. Anna smiles and laughs at the kids, toys, and animals she sees, and it definitely reinforces what her mother is teaching her. Thank you for making this wonderful video (this language is so hard to find!) - when is the next one going to come out? - Sincerely, Anna's "Papa"


Great video!   October 22, 2004
Oxana Maitre (Cincinnati, Ohio)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I am from Russian originaly, and got this tape to help my twins with their Russian. It is a very good tape with plenty of repetition to help the little once remember. My kids 2 years old and speak Russian and English fluently.
Audio Lingual intake of information is a lot easier to process for kids, I highly recommend this tape!