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| The fear and panic is real; the iPad ran out of juice |
I think that readers of my blog have already understood how much I love my iPad. My little paddy is nowadays completely essential to me, for home as well as for business travels when all the movies, comics, games, books and built in camera for Skype comes in very handy indeed. Mrs. Sunshine also has an iPad, unfortunately Toddler Sunshine has not completely grasped this and is under the misguided impression that the iPad is actually hers and hers only, severely limiting Mrs. Sunshine's ability to use it when Toddler S is around as she is bound to throw a fit if someone is using HER iPad.
The iPad is filled up with a considerable number of apps for preschool kids, mostly of the educational variety, puzzles and stuff. I have tried to find good apps for toddlers in Japanese and Swedish but the availability of good ones has been scarce so most of the apps are in English. As faithful readers of the blog might remember, I have an elaborate scheme on how to maintain the language dominance in the household (refresher link to the post here). But in any case, our basic strategy for teaching Toddler Sunshine languages is to focus on Japanese and Swedish for now and not really try to teach her English just yet.
The other week, me and Toddler Sunshine was sitting in the sofa next to each other, me using my iPad while Toddler Sunshine was playing with her (read: Mrs. Sunshine's) iPad. I see from the corner of my eye how she starts up an app with English vocabulary training and does a game where a voice spells out a word and a number of pictures show up and the objective is to push the picture that corresponds with the word. I notice that she manages to hit the picture of an onion when the word comes up but chalk it up to luck, but then just a few seconds later I notice with great surprise how she effortlessly gets ten words in a row correct...
Then again a few days later she's playing with another app training vocabulary for colors in English and hear her gleefully and with almost perfect pronunciation repeats the main colors (for some reason she seem to like "yellow"). This is at a point where we have not gotten her to know the words for colors in Japanese or Swedish yet.
The iPad is a great and terrible thing indeed and the educational potential could completely ruin my plans for language domination in the household... Perhaps I should just delete all the English apps and fill it up with apps from a number of random languages to try to distort the damage already done...
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5 comments:
Ah yes, the global hegemony continues. Don't try to fight it, it's inevitable.
Though I suspect her Japanese will pick right up as soon as she starts some sort of school. Don't envy you trying to keep up the Swedish, though. How different is it from English, anyway?
@kamo, Swedish can almost be considered a dialect of Norwegian, which itself derives from English. The main differences are in the written languages, which uses some exotic letters such as ö, ä and å, as well as the reverse "B" adopted from Russian (most famously used by popular Swedish singing group ᗅᗺᗷᗅ).
Kamo - Yeah, the Japanese will come anyway so that's not a worry. The Swedish is harder to deal with... Swedish is very similar to English in terms of grammar but the words are completely different.
Octo - Indeed, first time ever I don't feel like I need to correct you!
Seriously? That backwards B is a real letter? I always thought it was just a branding thing. You live and learn...
(Gives a high-five to Octo and giggles)
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