My baby had reached the age to start English, so I bought him a stack of English flashcards. He often plays with them on his own, spreading them all over the couch and the play mat. Halfway through, he’ll pull one out and hand it to his grandma. She recognizes the card, a mother holding a sleeping baby. But she hesitates, because the card only has English on it, and she doesn’t know what that word says. My baby just sits there waiting for her to speak.
The cards I bought are simple: a picture on top, one line of English underneath. When an adult sits down to look at an English book or a stack of word cards with a child, they usually last two or three minutes before giving up. There are many reasons, no time, the child won’t sit still, all of it.
But I think there’s another reason: they can’t read the English, so they don’t know what the picture is really about. They want to tell their baby about it, but they’re afraid of saying it wrong and teaching the child something incorrect, so they don’t say anything at all. And after the child brings the card over a few times and finds the adult still won’t play along, he loses interest too.
After noticing this, I built my own English learning app for toddlers.
On the cards in my app, there’s an image at the top so the baby can see what the word means. Underneath is the word in English paired with the Chinese. A toddler can’t read yet, but he knows those marks are words. At two or three he doesn’t know the English word at the top, but after playing with it many times, he probably has a rough idea of what “apple” looks like. Later, when he starts learning to read, that sense of print will give him an easier transition, and that’s how he’ll slowly come to recognize the word. That faint line of text at the bottom is for the adult. For example, grandma looks at the card of a mother holding a sleeping baby and sees at a glance that the word below means “mom.” She doesn’t need to speak English. She just taps the card and it says the word out loud. She feels like she understood it, and she’s willing to sit with the child.
From the picture alone, a child can pick up plenty. Apple, dog, cat, the simple ones are obvious at a glance. But there’s a whole category, actions and feelings, where a single image can carry a lot of information. Even an adult looking at it isn’t sure what it’s actually teaching, and many grandparents don’t know what the English word says either. Once an adult hesitates, they’d rather not say anything at all, because they’re afraid of teaching the baby something wrong.
When a young child is starting out with English, it mostly comes down to someone pointing at things right in front of them, saying what the word is, and asking what the picture means. If the adult doesn’t even know what that line of text says, there’s no way they can help the child learn English in any meaningful way.
So I built my app around exactly that. The baby looks at the picture and the large English word below it, and tapping the card plays the English audio for him. The adult reads the small line underneath, taps it to hear the pronunciation, and grandma just repeats after it, or the baby can simply listen. I made that small line deliberately small and faint, so the child’s attention doesn’t land on it. It stays on the big English word above.
The adult understands it, and is willing to speak. The child feels the adult is playing along with him, so he keeps coming back to ask grandma what’s on the card and what it means. And the adult is happy to sit with him, because now they understand it too.
The app is called BabbleNest. Just search for it and you can download it. If you have an adult at home who doesn’t speak English but still wants to keep the child company, give it a try.