When I was studying French in college, I was interested in TinTin and the French comic saga "Asterix" (about Gauls vs. Romans mostly as I remember).
The French in these comics was not always that easy to read...but I wish they had been available to me as a child who could have started learning French back in elementary school...they would have made a great teaching devise.
Maybe even better would have been French versions of such comics as "Blondie" and later, "Peanuts."
I propose the idea to two woman from the NY State Board of Education once that kids would learn accentless foreign languages if they started earlier ( scientific studies of the brain now bear this out)...they of course dumped cold water all over the idea for endless reasons.
My main point was one way to motivate children to learn another language ( or just English) was to make it FUN.
Oh, by the way, "Sesame Street" came out a short time later and revolutionized childrens' television with the same concept.
A little more about TinTin from the Wikipedia:
The Adventures of Tintin (Les Aventures de Tintin) is a series of classic comic books created by Belgian artist Georges Rémi (1907–1983), who wrote under the pen name of Hergé. The series is one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century, with translations published in more than 80 languages and more than 350 million copies of the books sold to date.[1]
The series first appeared in French in Le Petit Vingtième, a children's supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le XXe Siècle on 10 January 1929. The success of the series saw the serialised strips collected into a series of twenty-four albums, spun into a successful Tintin magazine, and adapted for film, radio, television and theatre.
Set during a largely realistic 20th century, the hero of the series is Tintin, a young Belgian reporter. He is aided in his adventures by his faithful fox terrier dog Snowy (Milou in French). Later, popular additions to the cast included the brash and cynical Captain Haddock, the highly intelligent but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus (Professeur Tournesol) and other supporting characters such as the incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson (Dupont et Dupond). Hergé himself features in several of the comics as a background character, as do his assistants in some instances.
The comic strip series has long been admired for its clean, expressive drawings in Hergé's signature ligne claire style.[2][3][4][5] Its engaging,[6] well-researched[6][7][8] plots straddle a variety of genres: swashbuckling adventures with elements of fantasy, mysteries, political thrillers, and science fiction. The stories within the Tintin series always feature slapstick humour, offset in later albums by dashes of sophisticated satire and political/cultural commentary.
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