Hi 🙂 We started a podcast. It’s on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. We’re telling the story of Journey to the West and then discussing what surprises us or what we connect with based on our Chinese American and Taiwanese American experiences. I’m still feeling it out and there are a lot of improvements that canContinue reading “New Podcast and Instagram”
Category Archives: Bilingual Baby
Bus, no bus!
I was right about the language explosion. Ro is 19 months old and we are hitting that phase where more and more sounds are becoming available to him and he is starting to repeat words that we say. He is also starting to put together subject-verb phrases like 妈妈抱!(Pick me up, mama!) and 妈妈拜!(Bye mama!).Continue reading “Bus, no bus!”
18 month Toddler Chinese/English Book Review
Hi everyone, it’s time for our first book review 🙂 These are the books Ro currently loves as an 18-month old bilingual baby. We as parents love these too, but out of all of the many, many books in our house, these are the ones he requests most often. Chinese books Sourcing Chinese board booksContinue reading “18 month Toddler Chinese/English Book Review”
(Ba)nana and ba(ll)!
At almost 18 months we have our first English words – banana (nana) and ball (ba). Baby’s babbling has gotten much more complex, with sounds like “eesh”, “gengda”, and “buyiyang”, but ba, ma, and na are still the sounds he uses to communicate most. And boy does he squeeze every drop of value from eachContinue reading “(Ba)nana and ba(ll)!”
Fourth word: 个!
Honestly, I’m not even sure how to explain this one. 个 is the most common measure word in Chinese, with a similar grammatical role as the word “piece” in a piece of cake or a piece of paper. Unlike piece, 个 can be used with most nouns. We use it with Ro when he’s alreadyContinue reading “Fourth word: 个!”
New word: Milk!
Baby Ro has just turned 1, and his babbling has become much more diversified in the last few weeks. We can only decipher one new word though: 奶 (milk), which he consistently says when he’s hungry. In the way of babies, he doubles this word into 奶奶 (paternal grandmother). However, it’s been six months sinceContinue reading “New word: Milk!”
Baba wins over dada
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,Continue reading “Baba wins over dada”
First word!
Baby Ro is nine months old. He has been babbling for a while now, but the other day he looked me straight in the face and said mama! I’d always heard that bilingual children can be late talkers, but mama is pretty much the same in Chinese and English, so it probably doesn’t matter. OnContinue reading “First word!”
Two Chinese Americans walk into a bar
I started another project, and this one is one that will last a lifetime. We had a baby! And we are trying to raise him English/Chinese bilingual. Everything I’ve read about raising bilingual children recommends one of two strategies: One Parent One Language, or Minority Language at Home. The problem is that my husband andContinue reading “Two Chinese Americans walk into a bar”