About 2 weeks after Baby Ro first started saying mama/妈妈, he also started saying baba/爸爸. I have seen some signs that he knows what mama and baba mean, but there are also definitely times when he says them to himself just for fun too. It’s interesting to see that he picked baba instead of dada, since we were using 爸爸 and Daddy interchangeably. However, our nanny has been saying 爸爸 to him during the day, so he probably had a lot more exposure to baba than dada.
Speaking of our nanny, she definitely spends more time actively teaching him words than we do, for example telling him “This is a ball.” and “Can you give me the ball?”, in Chinese of course. On the other hand, we are mostly talking to him about what is happening in the moment, like “Let mama put on your shirt,” and we switch off speaking Chinese and English. We are now making a bit more effort to speak Chinese at home to him, because eventually we’ll be sending him to daycare and then all of the Chinese exposure will be on us, and we need to get in the habit. I’m looking forward to seeing what words he picks up in Chinese first, and which he picks up in English.
Last thing: we speak English to our dog. Arty does not understand Chinese, and I don’t have the bandwidth to retrain him in Chinese, so we are not going to eliminate English from our home.
Etymology Adventures 