How Do You Say Good Night? is a great short bedtime read-along for small children and a great quick read for adults. It teaches the reader how to say ‘good night’ in Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, French, Portuguese, Swahili, Italian, Arabic, Vietnamese, German and Korean. Each language has the pronunciation typed out below which is extremely helpful. With the nature of society today and racial, religious and territorial conflicts among politics, this book is a great way to introduce different ethnicities, languages and translations to children at a young age. I did find myself wishing there were even more languages included, and this encouraged me to do a few Google searches on my own.
When finishing this short book, I saw on the back cover that there is another book like this titled How Do You Say I Love You? by Hannah Eliot and illustrated by the same author, Shirley Ng-Benitez. I think it would be great to invest the time in the other books like this one and it would be great to see a trend of books like this exposing both young children and the adults that read to them these different places, languages and words through illustrations that show all of this. It’s a short book I don’t see myself getting tired of reading to a child at night just because it would also help me remember how to say ‘good night’ in all these languages.
Overall, the book was a great experience and it is always nice learning something new, especially while teaching a child.