A carschool mom in Virginia keeps an inflatable globe in the car, and her children use it to point to a country and challenge each other to say “hello” in the language of that country.
She said, “Initially, they didn’t know many languages. We found a site on the Internet called ‘Say Hello to the World’ at www.ipl.org/youth/hello. You just click on a country name and the word for ‘hello’ in that country’s main language appears and you can hear a native speaker say the word so you can learn the correct pronunciation.
They used a notebook to create a list of countries, the predominant language spoken there, and the word for ‘hello’ (including the phonetic spelling so they would remember how to pronounce it). They take the notebook along in the car and use it in their global game.
One player points to a country, and the other looks it up and says ‘hello’ in that language. Once they mastered ‘hello’ in a particular language, they began to search for how to say ‘good-bye’ and other words or phrases as well. Not only have they learned a lot about the many languages of the world, but they also learned a lot about geography and where different countries are located on the globe.”
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