Amazon When my cousin's wife's baby boy was just born I was brainstorming on what gift I should get them. They had absolutely everything - baby clothes, diapers, baby stroller, cradle, infant car seat, ... You name it and they got it!
It is scientifically proven that when an infant is born they have up to 6 months for their brain to be fully developed. During this time whatever information their brain receives becomes part of their brain for eternity! Imagine how cool it is. What they learn during this period of time becomes part of them for the rest of their lives. The bad thing is if they learn something bad or get scared by something they may be scared by it for the rest of their lives
I know what to get the baby boy!
Then I suddenly realized that I should take the direction where the gift would be educational and help the baby intellectually. Why not get them a set of multi language CDs or DVDs so that when he grows up he'll be able to speak 8 languages?
So where do I find CDs that speak multiple languages? More importantly how do I make sure the speaker does NOT speak improper content in those languages? It turns out it's extremely DIFFICULT to locate such CDs or DVDs! Do a search on Google and you'll see what I mean.
Solution - 1st part
One idea suddenly struck me - online radio stations. There are many English online radio stations that air popular channels' content 24/7! If such radio stations exist for English channels they must exist for Chinese, German, Japanese, Spanish, French, Russian channels!
Then I found this wonderful online radio website - http://tunein.com/. "TuneIn gives you access to over 50,000 of the world's radio stations so you can find and listen to unlimited music, sports and talk radio." You simply search for the language you want to find radios for and you see a list of relevant results! For example if you are looking for Spanish radios type 'Spanish' in the search box and Search and the URL will become http://tunein.com/search/?query=Spanish in which you'll see all the Spanish channels! Here's a list of radios of various languages all over the world (burn them on a CD or a DVD and you'll get a multi language CD or DVD):
- English: http://tunein.com/search/?query=English
- Chinese: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Chinese
- Mandarin: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Mandarin
- Spanish: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Spanish
- Portuguese: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Portuguese
- Hindi: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Hindi
- Arabic: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Arabic
- Japanese: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Japanese
- German: http://tunein.com/search/?query=German
- French: http://tunein.com/search/?query=French
- Italian: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Italian
- Russian: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Russian
- Malaysian: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Malaysian
- Taiwanese: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Taiwanese
- Korean: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Korean
- Turkish: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Turkish
- Vietnamese: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Vietnamese
- Polish: http://tunein.com/search/?query=Polish
Solution - 2nd part
However if I just email my cousin and his wife this list of online radio station URLs of different languages in the world it seems too shabby doesn't it? As I suggested earlier you can burn them on a CD or a DVD and you'll get a multiple language CD or DVD! The problem is there is no audio file that contains the radio station's content. Here are two ways you can solve it:
- Play the radio and direct audio output to audio input of your computer via a wire while recording the audio content with such software as Audacity. Once you are done burn the audio content onto a CD.
- Buy the audio content directly from Amazon and burn it onto a CD. Simply go to Amazon and select 'MP3 Downloads' in the Search drop down menu and search for the language you are interested in such as 'Spanish'.