Comic Books Improve Early Childhood Literacy 127
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that Professor Carol Tilley, a professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, says that comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of reading, children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from reading other kinds of books, and that there is evidence that comics increase children's vocabulary and instill a love of reading. 'A lot of the criticism of comics and comic books come from people who think that kids are just looking at the pictures and not putting them together with the words,' says Tilley. 'But you could easily make some of the same criticisms of picture books – that kids are just looking at pictures, and not at the words.' Tilley says that some of the condescension toward comics as a medium may come from the connotations that the name itself evokes but that the distinct comic book aesthetic — frames, thought and speech bubbles, motion lines, to name a few — has been co-opted by children's books, creating a hybrid format."
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Also foreign language learning. . . (Score:4, Informative)
A friend of mine is obsessed with all things Japanese. I'm interested in the language myself, so I used the Rosetta stone software. I was impressed with what I was able to learn. Fast forward two years.
He knows way more Japanese than I do. I can barely remember the katakana/hirogana. He has a real actual USE for it, and uses it daily. I don't use it much at all. When I do, I have to look everything up.
I suspect if I had gotten some manga (in Japanese) or read a lot of Japanese websites, I'd be much better at it today.
Re:Also foreign language learning. . . (Score:5, Informative)
Manga is excellent at teaching spoken Japanese. Almost without exception the language you see is the same language that people are using to communicate in every day situations. Of course you have to avoid using extremely rude or bizarre expressions. But it isn't actually difficult to determine what those are. People who don't read manga have this strange idea that manga readers walk around talking like Naruto. The one drawback is that you aren't going to be exposed to a large amount of very polite language. But, personally, I think you shouldn't concentrate on that until you have a decent fluency with plain forms (YMMV)
For anyone who wants to read manga to learn Japanese I have two pieces of advice. If your vocabulary isn't that good, you'll be looking up every second word and it will go too slowly for you to remember anything. Memorize vocabulary as you go until you can read about 95% without looking up the words. After that point, you may not have to memorize words explicitly if you are reading enough. You might just learn them as you're reading (again, YMMV). But using a computer or electronic dictionary dramatically speeds up searching, so don't bother with paper.
The second piece of advice is to read Tae Kim's Grammar guide http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar [guidetojapanese.org] There is almost nothing in a manga that isn't covered in this guide. I also believe that Tae Kim's presentation is vastly superior to any other Japanese grammar book. Personally, I memorize all the example sentences from the guide (English --> Japanese) using a spaced repetition program.
Using primarily manga and Tae Kim's guide I've become relatively functional in Japanese. I can hang out with people who only speak Japanese and have a good time. I've even been on a couple of dates where the girl didn't speak any English. I've never taken a Japanese class.