Italian Children’s Book: ABC Italiano and Learning Italian

Needless to say, I was speaking full blown English by the time Christmas arrived and I may have even been permitted to wear a pair of white sneakers to class on occasion (I’ll save my snack time story for another post).

My mother was right to suggest to Mrs Biggio that I start school even though my primary language was not English given how our brains our structured for language acquisition.  That is to say, most linguists agree that the time period from birth to just prior to puberty is a golden period in terms of language acquisition and that the “language acquisition device” — a mechanism which enables an individual to recreate correctly the rules (grammar) and certain other characteristics of language used by speakers around the learner is strongest during the aforementioned time period.  

I was fortunate to be raised in two language communities (one that spoke Italian <viz., my family> and another that spoke English <viz., school, community, etc>) so the second language acquisition thing came easily.  However, what if you’re immediate family does not speak a second language and you’re only exposed to English?  The best strategy for learning Italian as a second language is to start young and to expose the child to an Italian speaking community as often as possible.  A well stocked Italian children’s book library wouldn’t hurt, as well.

ABC Italiano is one such children’s book I highly recommend.  The book, written and illustrated by Sonya Caruso, is a simple and wonderful introduction to Italian for your toddler.  We “tested” ABC Italiano on our 16 month old son and he thoroughly enjoyed the minimalist illustrations and selected words for each letter of the Italian alphabet.  As my elementary education teacher wife suggested, the book is perfect for a young Italian language learner and both the word set the author selected along with the colorful and simple illustrations make for a great introduction to the Italian language.

In fact, we’re so excited about ABC Italiano that we’ve partnered with the author to give two copies of the book away to two lucky Scordo.com readers.  As always, there a few caveats: