I knew that I wanted our family to begin learning how to speak Korean (my husband is Korean-American and our kids are biracial), so when I stumbled upon TalkBox.Mom, I was immediately intrigued. The website claimed that you would be able to start speaking a foreign language right away with their program, and I’ll admit that I was pretty skeptical about it. After all, I’ve taken my share of foreign language classes when I was younger (German in high school, French in college), and I certainly wasn’t speaking any of it on day 1. So I signed up for the FREE starter pack so we could get a sense of how the whole thing worked before fully committing.

Too good to be true? It turns out, no! The first challenge arrived in my inbox and we sat down as a family to do it together. I was scared –I wasn’t sure I could learn a new language as an adult, and I desperately wanted to be able to be part of this experience with my family. As soon as we got started, I immediately felt confident and started enjoying myself. Before we knew it, we were passing a ball back and forth and talking about it in Korean! By the second challenge, we were able to talk about getting ready to leave the house and buckling up in the car in Korean. By the third challenge, we were hooked.

We signed up for the Korean TalkBox.Mom program and chose the “Let’s Take Things Slow” option to receive one box every 3 months. It has been the perfect speed for our family! We decided that Sundays would be “Korean Sunday Funday,” where we would sit down together for that week’s lesson before enjoying Korean food for dinner. Each lesson includes some printed material like a poster or cards, native speaker audio in an easy-to-use app, and simple, immediately useful phrases to practice together. This is not like high school German class where you spend the majority of the time conjugating verbs and learning vocabulary you’ll never actually use — the very first box is all about food, meals, and the kitchen. Within days, we were able to incorporate Korean phrases into our daily mealtimes and meal planning. 

We hung up the printed materials from the first box in the kitchen since that’s where we’ll be using them in everyday conversation, and now we regularly ask each other what we want to eat, what we should put on the meal plan for the week, and even remind each other to put our dishes in the dishwasher and to clean up after ourselves! We each committed to our own individual practice times throughout the week, when we listen to the native speaker audio and practice that week’s phrases.

My favorite part about the TalkBox.Mom program is that there’s no pressure! In fact, they explicitly tell you NOT to correct each other’s pronunciation and instead to have fun with it. This has been such a fun family experience, and I am so glad we took the plunge.

If you are looking for a fun family foreign language experience that will *literally* have you speaking that same day, I highly recommend TalkBox.Mom. They have programs for:

• Spanish
• French
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Chinese
• Japanese
• Russian
• Romanian
• German
• Hebrew
• Korean

Head over there and sign up for the FREE Starter Pack in whatever language you prefer to see if this is the right fit for your family — I’m going to bet that it is!