Rifling through other people's kid's piles of Christmas presents, I found The Babbler under Modern Day Dad's tree. When a kid activates it, The Babbler makes those hard-to-pronounce-unless-you're-a-native-speaker sounds in French, Spanish, and Japanese so that he becomes familiar with them.
See, apparently, infants are born with the ability to make every possible sound in any language; kind of like Data on Star Trek. [Dork!] It's only through learning a language that they "forget" how to make other sounds. So get The Babbler, and your kid'll be trilling his R's like Speedy Gonzalez, and faw-faw-fawing like Pepe Le Peu in no time.
Suddenly, the image of Alec Baldwin teaching French on Saturday Night Live comes to mind. Why is that?
The Babbler will be at Amazon some day, promise, and at Geniusbabies.com. Plus, check out Modern Day Dad's firsthand account.
Keep looking for the clip: Alec Baldwin's SNL French Class transcript
I love the Babbler, but I thought it was no longer being made (I had to dig one up on eBay). The best bit is, if you forget to turn it off, in the middle of the night while stumbing around trying to find a pacifier or something, you kick it and it shouts "Konichiwa!" which can be quite disturbing ...