"I couldn't recommend this book enough - it is an absolute godsend for repatriated parents like myself struggling to help their children 'fit in' to their new surroundings and for expat ones wanting to keep their children in touch with their language and cultural roots." Having moved to Gurgaon recently, I was faced by the daunting task of teaching my six year old British-born bilingual son a largely unfamiliar third language, Hindi. I am actually being quite generous when I call my son bilingual – the truth is that he speaks, reads, writes and thinks in English, but also understands and speaks Bangla (our mother-tongue) with increasing fluency. And until now, Hindi had always been the incomprehensible language of the songs that played in his father’s car! The ‘traditional’ Hindi language book just didn’t work for us with my son switching off completely after the first page with its ‘k se kabutar’, ‘kh se khargosh’ and its staid illustrations. I was getting rather worried about how he was ever going to learn the language when I discovered Tulika’s Pond/Talaab and Blackboard/Shyampatt and then there was no looking back. These two books form part of a bilingual series, conceived by Radhika Menon and beautifully executed by two talented design interns working for Tulika while still completing their training. Available in many language combinations (English with any among Hindi, Bangla, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Marathi and Gujarati), both Pond and Blackboard match delightful pictures in vibrant colours with simple nouns and verbs that are so relevant to a child – I mean, which little boy or girl wouldn’t want to know what a lion is in a different language, especially when you can also find out how this lion roars, sings, dances even, in that other language! The books come with very useful tips both for the parent at home and the teacher at school on how to use the words to teach children the basics of the target language. While I am using the books to teach Hindi, they can also be used to teach English to children whose first language is Hindi (or any of the other languages that the books come in). The idea is to encourage the child to relate to the words in the language that he/she is familiar with and then introduce the same word in the target language with the help of the picture and the theme that the word is set in. I particularly liked how the ‘secondary’ words flow out of the ‘main’ word in Blackboard – for example, each of the words on the ‘umbrella’ page were so logically related to the main word that my son was second-guessing them even before we had read them properly – everyone knows that you have to open and close an umbrella and it does want to fly away when it is windy! My son was also fascinated by the fact that in Pond, a bit of the picture from one page actually continued on to the next, so when the crow drops the biscuit in the ‘crow’ page, it actually falls on the worm’s head in the following ‘worm’ page - this little feature made him eager to go on and find out what the next word was. The illustrations in both the books, while very different from each other, are a winner and make these books stand out amongst the others in this genre (at least the ones that I have come across). The big ‘googly’ eyes in the pictures in Pond make them come alive as do the bold strokes and the vivid palette. In Blackboard, the black-and-white chalk drawings, amazing in their simplicity, are sharply contrasted by the eye-catching, complex coloured drawings on the following page. The fonts used are big and bold in both the books and the word-lists at the end help to reinforce the words learnt. The story ideas themselves are fun and whacky – we loved how the ‘song-lines’ come out of the mouths of the lion and little girl in the ‘lion’ page in Blackboard and then how the two of them dangle from it at the top of the page; in Pond, on the ‘frog’ page, it was delightful to see the changes in the frog’s expressions right from when it lazily flicks his tongue to catch the passing fly, to the look of pure terror when it sees the snake from the previous page eyeing him, down to when it makes a swift getaway! While we have some way to go before my son will be able to speak, read, and write Hindi like a pro, he certainly has made good progress in these three weeks – he recognises many letters of the alphabet, he knows quite a few everyday words as well as names of many animals, he can read his name in Hindi using the letters and patterns from the words in the books, and he knows that verbs in Hindi end with a ‘-na’. More importantly for me, the pictures and words in Pond and Blackboard have made him want to learn more Hindi words and string together simple sentences on his own accord. I couldn’t recommend these two books enough – they are an absolute godsend for repatriated parents like myself struggling to help their children ‘fit in’ to their new surroundings and for expat ones wanting to keep their children in touch with their language and cultural roots (or, for that matter, for anyone learning a language). Since I got my copy, another copy of Pond has already made its way to my friend in Cambridge who is enjoying every moment of teaching her son his mother-tongue. 
-TBR, November 2009

"I couldn't recommend this book enough - it is an absolute godsend for repatriated parents like myself struggling to help their children 'fit in' to their new surroundings and for expat ones wanting to keep their children in touch with
-TBR, November 2009