Hello World!

Hello World

By: Jonathon Litton

I have been meaning to put a post up about this book for months!  I first came across it last summer at the Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor.  I sat for nearly half an hour paging through the book, flipping up the little tabs and being amazed by the myriad of languages that exist around the world. It took everything I had to walk out the door that day without it in my hands, but as I was continuing to amass translated texts at that time, I put this one on the wish list for the future.  I even put up a quick mention of it on my Facebook page then, noting how special and unique I thought it was so that I wouldn't forget to eventually come back to it and hoping that someone else might be inspired to pick it up as well.

A few days before Christmas, I walked into my kid's elementary school to volunteer for their class parties, stopping by the front office to sign in.  The ladies in the office stopped me, telling me "Santa" had stopped by and left something for me, handing me a wrapped package.  I was baffled to see my name scrawled on the paper and tore into it to find a brand new copy of this book!  As much as I questioned the staff, my family and friends, I have yet to learn who so generously gifted me a copy of this beautiful book.

The book is larger than your average picture book and each double page spread features one of the seven continents.  A small figure and a "lift a flap" element exists for languages on that continent.  The name of the language is on the outside, and when you flip it up the word "hello" in that language appears, along with a phonetic pronunciation and an indication of the number of people in that specific location that speak the language.

The book also has other fun facts and interesting details about the regions, native speakers, words from the language and demographic information.  The final two pages then share those same languages saying "Good-Bye"

I have spent hours with this book since it was so kindly gifted to me, flipping up each of the little tabs and trying out how to say "Hello" in languages from around the world.  I think there is immense potential for this book to be used in the classroom and would highly encourage any teachers out there to check it out.

Getting Excited!

It's been a whirlwind around here lately!  I'm halfway through my final semester as an Undergrad - the end is in sight!  But I have a couple of big events coming up related to my project.

On March 18th I will be presenting a workshop at the Michigan Reading Association's Annual Conference.  You can check out information about the conference here.  I am so excited for the opportunity to share these books with educators that have the direct ability to put them into the hands of kids!  Plus, I can't wait to listen to some of the other presenters and maybe even meet some of my writing idols like Jason Reynolds, Lois Lowry or Sharon Draper!

On March 23rd I will be presenting at Eastern Michigan's Undergraduate Symposium.  This event is open to the public and I highly suggest coming to check it out if you have the opportunity.  Event details can be found here   I am personally presenting at 9:15am, but the event lasts all day.  I had the opportunity on Tuesday night to touch base with some of the other presenters at a workshop and the plethora of information covering a wide variety of disciplines is mind-boggling.   I am so proud to be part of this event again this year.

On a more personal note, my journey in Children's Literature is far from over.  In December I was officially accepted into Eastern's Children's Literature Master's program!  This week I also was offered a full-time Graduate Assistantship position of which it took me all of a nano-second to shout YES to!  I will be an instructor of a section of First-Year Writing as well as serving as a TA in an Introduction to Children's Literature lecture. 

I've got a couple other books I hope to get up and posted this week, so keep an eye out for that.  If you'd like further information on either of these events, send me an email!

USBBY 2018 Outstanding International Booklist

It's award season in the land of Children's Lit (ALA awards are on February 12th!) and the United States Book Board for Young people just released their 2018 Outstanding International Booklist as well.   You can find it here if you're interested!

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed in their picture book (I was using the K-2 designation) choices as less than half were translated titles.  While I understand that it's international books, not just translated materials, it seemed sharply skewed to titles from English speaking countries (Canada, UK and Australia).  And no love for South America.  On the other hand, I was excited to see titles from China and South Korea, suggesting that we may be seeing more translated titles from there to come!

From the list, I'm most excited to get my hands on Plume and Days with Dad as I've been reading great things about both titles!

There's A Word for That???

Best friends are awesome.  They get you sometimes when you don't get yourself.  They cheer you up, they encourage your pursuits, they make you laugh, they show up just when you need them.  And they bring you presents that are so perfectly you that it's eerie.  Like the book that showed up from my best friend, Colleen, this past Saturday.

This brand new book, What A Wonderful Word by Nicola Edwards and illustrated by Luisa Uribe is self-described as "a collection of untranslatable words from around the world."  The book explains that some words are common between languages and easily translatable - think that "Blue" in English easily becomes "Azul" in Spanish or "Mavi" in Turkish.  But what about a word or a phrase that is more tied to a way of life for a specific culture that may be unfamiliar to another so there's no direct word that translates?  This book is full of examples!

Since I got it, I have had so much fun pouring through these pages.  Do you know what a "Poronkusema" is?  Well, in Finnish it means the distance a reindeer can walk before needing to use the bathroom, which is no more than 4.7 miles. What about a "Pochemuchka"'?  That's Russian for a child who asks "why?" all the time; a person who asks too many questions.  I'm sure this is an idea that parents around the world can relate to but the Russian language has one specific word to represent the concept.  Both of these ideas are important to the culture, so much so that they have their own specific word.  The book goes on to detail that reindeer are so important in northern Finland, the language has around 400 words about the food, tools, and products created from the animal and that the phrase "I don't know" has been banned in a Serbian town to keep officials from making excuses,.  These specifics show WHY those languages have created a singular word to fit just that situation.  How amazing is language??

From Sanskrit to Hopi to Wagiman, there are plenty of examples of similar word to explanatory phrases.  I may start borrowing "gluggavendur" to describe Michigan winter as it is what they say in Iceland when the weather looks beautiful while you're inside but is much too cold when you step outside or perhaps remember to be so thankful that Colleen is my "nakama" what the Japenese refer to as friends who are like family. 

I'm enamored with the text and I think it is a wonderful representation of the power of language.  As the author writes in the introduction "It tells us what an interesting mix human beings are, and it reassures us that we are understood, that we're all the same on some level.  It's nice, isn't it, to know that someone else has had the same feeling or experience as you and given it, at long last, a name of its own?"   I highly suggest checking this book out!

A cultural connection or growing pains?

So I just couldn't stay away from blogging after I stumbled across this article the other day by based on a study out of the University of California Riverside, examining how lessons vary from culture to culture in picture books. The results were recently published in Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology examing a list of "learning-related" values and checked to see how often the books promoted them. The values included setting a goal to achieve something difficult, putting in a lot effort to complete the task and generally viewing intelligence as a trait that can be acquired through hard work rather than a quality that you're born with.

The researchers then studied picture books from the United States, China and Mexico to see how the lessons varied and how frequently each appeared in books from the different cultures. Researchers found that a heavy theme of these values appeared twice as frequently in the books from China as those from the United States. Further, books from the United States more prevalently had a theme or message about happiness.

You can read further into the study yourself, but I can't say, based on the books that I read and my own findings that I'm much surprised by the fact that there is a notable difference between the themes and messages in the books from place to place. I found that MANY times in all my reading.  I think that goes back to the idea of children and what role they play in each of those societies.

Another thought did strike me, though, based on what I found about the Children's book industry in China, back from when we talked about My Grandmother Lives In A Perfume Village. It was there that I learned that the children’s book market in China is a rapidly expanding industry, largely unrecognized until about the past fifteen years.  I'm wondering if this has anything to do with the content of the books being created and then researched in this study.  If you consider the texts that were first produced for children in England and America, they were extremely didactic in nature and leaned heavily on morals and teaching a specific lesson via the story.  I am curious if this is similar to the growth period for the industry in China.  As it is still evolving, is it experiencing similar growing pains as it attempts to define what children's literature means to the culture there?  I think as the study suggests, the culture itself plays a large part, but I'm wondering if as more and more books are produced in China if the strong moral bent to their literature for children will start to shift over time.  Definitely something to consider for a future rabbit hole ;-)