21-Month Toddler Chinese/English Bilingual Book Review

牛来了 [Here Comes the Cow] is the third book in the set that also includes 早安晚安 [Good Morning, Good Night] and 小雨滴 [Little Raindrop]. This has become the most requested CD in the car (“牛马 CD!”)

In the last couple of weeks, Ro has started requesting specific songs in the book like 小麻雀 [Little Sparrow] and singing along to his favorites. He has the order of songs in all of the CDs memorized at this point.

Our first bilingual book! 波波爱吃小笼包 /Bobo Loves Dumplings is a 1-10 dimsum counting story. This book includes Pinyin so my husband can read it too, but the language does feel a little bit stiff.

We’ve had this book for a while, but Ro wasn’t really interested until recently, when he discovered that the 酱油 [soy sauce] on our dining table and the 酱油 in this book are the same thing. He’s just having a condiments moment.

He also loves to tell us that Bobo’s soy sauce is 玻璃 [glass], since we keep telling him to be careful with glass bottles.

In 月亮说晚安 [The Moon Says Goodnight], the moon has trouble falling asleep and goes around saying good night to all of the sleeping animals.

This was a favorite around 19 months. Ro couldn’t really talk yet, but he would show us that he knew what a 长颈鹿 [giraffe] was by showing us a giraffe toy, or pulling out his stuffed snake when we said 晚安 [good night] to the 蛇 [snake]. Now, at 21 months, he can say all of the names of the animals.

Likewise, he has learned the names of all of the vehicles in 汽车汽车爱玩水 [Cars Love to Play in the Rain], a book where all manner of vehicles come out to play. The back inside cover has charming little rhymes about each vehicle that we absolutely love.

Ro is definitely a stereotypical toddler boy in this sense – he loves construction vehicles. We have a construction site jigsaw and toy cars that lets him apply the vocabulary he (and I) learned in this book. It did occur to me that as a Chinese American, I would never have learned the word for bulldozer unless I had a toddler boy.

I Spy on the Farm is essentially a book of farm animals and animal sounds.

Ro calls this book “E-I-E-I-O”. We don’t really read this book so much as look at the pictures and talk about the animals in both Chinese and English. I would say that this is the first book that he read by himself, as he flips through, points to the animals, and yells out the names and sounds in delight.

Bug Block is one of those simple science books for babies, but more than that, it’s the first “lift the flap” type books that Ro hasn’t immediately destroyed to see how it works. The interactable elements are interesting enough that Ro enjoys them, but also simple enough that he doesn’t have an urge to take it apart to figure it out.

Ro is still a little young for the science, but we enjoy the illustrations very much. He also likes that the reader stand-in characters – a grandpa, two kids, and a dog – also appear in Space Block.

This is one of my old books. I was/am a biology nerd, and I picked this up when a library threw it out over a decade ago. Who needs science books for babies when you can just have science books?

This book lives on our coffee table at the perfect height for Ro to stand there and flip through it. I love that he is seeing photos of real animals in their natural environment. I am hoping that books like this will help cultivate a sense of wonder in the world around us.