I speak one. She'll speak two.

December 4, 2008 1:19 PM

I'm looking for bilingual children's book recommendations for a toddler being raised to speak English and Italian.
posted by azure_swing to Shopping (5 answers total)

Do you mean the book has to have text in both English and Italian? Or are you just looking for suitable books in both languages?
posted by Miko at 3:06 PM on December 4, 2008

Tomie DiPaola has a series called Strega Nona.
And there's The Sandwich, by Ian Wallace and Angela Wood, about a Canadian kid being teased for eating mortadella and provolone sandwiches. I remember this being read to me when I was very small, and really liking it when the reader overemphasized the pronunciations of the Italian words.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 3:35 PM on December 4, 2008

Response by poster: Miko: I'm looking for the texts to be in both languages, so that the father could read the English text & the mother read the Italian.
posted by azure_swing at 7:23 PM on December 4, 2008

Okay..I'm no expert on that, but a search on "English-Italian bilingual children's books" did turn up some choices: One on Amazon, one at this neato worldlanguage.com site, and some at Language Lizard. I can't help if you need specific recommendations, but at least there are a lot of books published for this market!
posted by Miko at 8:37 AM on December 5, 2008

Pinocchio? Possibly a bit too "grown up" for a toddler, but I've seen (and tried to read, with mixed results) several bilingual versions of Le Avventure di Pinocchio. This is, emphatically, not the Disney version, but it's illustrated!
posted by metricfuture at 5:08 PM on December 5, 2008