I learned to read Devanagari by putting generic Google images cards on my phone's wall paper.
replyThis is about memorizing foreign letters.
replyNo it's not. It's about teaching letter forms to kids.
reply… which heavily involves memorizing foreign letters. English and German mostly share the same alphabet, though, which suggests that the person asking the question hasn’t quite grasped the point. That’s what I was trying to get at in my comment.
replyThe author is a Greek-speaking parent teaching his Greek-speaking children to read by visually pairing each letter with a Greek word that starts with that letter.
replyIf you tried to teach English-speaking children with words that start with that letter in German, you'd probably confuse them quite a bit.
"We live abroad in China, and Greek is one of three languages my kids are learning."
replyright, but giving English-speaking kids the following would help them:
reply- a bear that looks like B
- an orange that looks like O
- a snake that looks like S
- a tree that looks like T
(and so on; that's just what I can think of off the top of my head)
The author criticizes also English cards for not having letter shapes.
replyAlso, "foreign" is always relative. How about an Ancient Greek referring to the barbarians who have no Greek? And, the author's using Greek while living in China.