Instant Immersion Language Starter for Kidsis a nice idea forparents who want to expose their children to foreign languages at a young age.With this program, you can offer your child a glimpse of Spanish, French,Italian, and German for a very low cost.

Instant Immersionrequires no installation at all. The program runsstraight from the CD-ROM and doesn't take up any space on your hard drive. Wehad some problems with the execution, however--the close functions are disabledwhen running the program, meaning there's no apparent way to shut it down whenyou're finished. Additionally, we could not discern an easy way to switch fromone language to another, as replacing the CD in the drive causes an error tooccur.

Instant Immersioncombines visual and audio effects to assist children inassociating pictures with foreign words and sounds. The program containsrecordings of each work by both male and female native speakers, thus exposingthe students to an even wider range of experiences.Instant Immersionalso has games for the child to play. These games are appropriately simple andshould be right on target for the intended audience.

Overall,Instant Immersionis an interesting idea. Children learnlanguages more readily than adults, and a program such asInstantImmersioncould truly tap that potential. However, even thoughInstantImmersionsuggests some interesting ideas on teaching a child to learn alanguage through a computer, its design and lack of sophistication limit itsactual capabilities.--Kendra Hayden