Friday Post - French for Kids by the Learning Tree

This was such utter crap.  Where do I begin?

Visually offensive.  As far as I saw, which was admittedly only about 15 minutes tops, they didn't use any steady shots as backdrops when they were doing scenes with the animated dog.  So he floats weirdly over the shaky-cam.  The narrator is in the shot as a large man in a tree costume.  Why?  for branding.  Oh, and the French girl wears a beret.  Because we're learning about French culture, too, I guess.

Not very educational.  The girl wakes up, rattles off 6 sentences in French and the viewer is immediately tested on the content.  They don't tell you what she's saying, either.  They rely on the viewer to be able to quickly read the English subtitles (I say quickly; the average 10 year old might be okay).  So it isn't even for kids, really.  But the large tree-man says, "See? Learning French is easy!" afterwards, which should fix EVERYTHING, but I guess my child is dumb.

Gimmicky.  The test that we are immediately given has a long intro with 3D animated text!  You have to pick up the DVD remote and answer true or false questions.  My two year old can't wield the remote, or understand the concept of true or false, or understand 6 phrases rattled off in French with subtitles with no repetition or explanation.  When they introduced the first question, "Comment ca va means 'Hello'!", she just repeated what they said so that she was learning the false questions as if they were true.   It was kind of funny.

I can't see this video being useful for anyone under the age of 12, and anyone over the age of 12 would be so annoyed with the content.  What a giant waste of time.