Say Da!

The nation's hottest self-education enterprise this year is the self-teaching language record. Nobody is sure how the spurt started, unless by the Sputnik-born furor over schools. But bookstore windows across the U.S. have blossomed with gaily packaged invitations to learning another tongue. The buyers: not only tourists and awakened adults, but thousands of parents who feel that children are not learning foreign languages early enough in school.

The new wrinkle is not the idea itself--Manhattan's mail-order Linguaphone Institute (34 languages) has sold records since 1932--but the wave of cheap records and new languages. The top record-makers are book publishers with expert pedagogical advisers and catchy trademarks: Living Spanish, etc. (Crown), Listen and Learn (Dover), Spoken French, etc. (Henry Holt), Italian for Children, etc. (Ottenheimer). In three years Crown's Living sets of four records each ($9.95) have passed the 600,000 mark.

The U.S.'s topmost record-learned foreign languages: Spanish, French, and now Russian (Dover's $5.95 Russian record has become a runaway bestseller in one year). Others: German, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, Polish, Greek; and Dover will soon have a $1 tourist's disk in Serbo-Croatian. Next year's expected big upstart: Japanese, with Crown and Dover both trying to hit the public first. This sort of thing has led Berlitz, the nationwide language studio chain, to second thoughts about its $75 record sets. Berlitz is now working hard to produce something cheaper. The market seems more than ready: some bookstores are selling as many language records as books. Said a delighted St. Louis bookseller last week, as he filled his window again: "Why, these records are selling as fast as Lady Chatterley's Lover."

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