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Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2006 18:48:57 +0200
From: Sylvain Wallez <sylvain@apache.org>
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Subject: Re: The all embarassing presentation email  :-)
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Simone Gianni wrote:
> Sylvain Wallez wrote:
>
>> A question: what language where these books written in: English or
>> Italian? I'm always amazed to see kids learning to program right after
>> learning to read. Computers weren't widespread when I was 7 (that was in
>> 1974) and I "only" started at 13, having already some english
>> background.
>
> Surprisingly it was in Italian. Then when i started Logo (a suggestion
> from a friend of my father when i told him i was doing weird stuff
> with basic on C64), I asked my father to buy a book on logo, but he
> took me a book in english, since it was hard to understand it, I asked
> my father to go back to the bookshop and take a "The same book on
> logo, but the italian version", and he took me a book about Logo in
> italian, but unfortunately for the "Italian version of Logo", where
> all commands were translated ... "FW" was translated in "AV", "RT" in
> "DS" etc .. :)

Oh, I remember something similar on my Apple II: some people provided a
translated version of the Basic keywords, and were calling this dialect
"Basicois". Totally ununderstandable if you already knew the original
Basic, even without knowing english ;-)

> My personal suggestion is to try to go for english, since it would
> improve both english and technical skills at once, but since a foreign
> language is often hard to approach, maybe starting with something
> simple and "child-friendly" (like Logo was, today what?) in native
> language can give the child the right interest and movivation to try
> an english book later.

I found some nice material in french for my kids for PHP and Python. But
the oldest one (14) has switched for quite some time now to the english
docs: the Python reference manual is currently on his night table!

Sylvain

-- 
Sylvain Wallez
http://bluxte.net
Apache Software Foundation Member