Peppered pig?
What we needed was to strike a balance by managing her digital content exposure so she wouldn’t forget the value of her books.
If you remember our very first blog post and our blog post about OPOL, then you will remember that one of the things I’ve learnt to optimise is my children’s exposure to another language. By creating a solid bilingual environment for them, it has helped my eldest daughter to become a confident speaker of both languages - and a code-switcher, at that!
It’s important to note that exposure to another language can be limited particularly when the parents or the community has limited fluency in that second language. Therefore, you must find other ways to increase their exposure so that the children are not just absorbing things that you know - but are absorbing things about all kinds of experiences.
My parents started much earlier than I did with the language environment exposure because I was initially a bit skeptical (and lazy, I’ll admit!). When she was about one, they insisted on talking to her in Mandarin while I was wavering inconsistently between Mandarin and English. Their efforts certainly paid off, though! When she started developing speech and language skills, she would always talk to my parents in Mandarin while she only spoke English to me!
However, my parents were equally aware that our accent, slang and mispronunciation with some Mandarin Chinese words would mean that she wouldn’t be learning standard Mandarin and, therefore, it would be less useful to her later in life. So to supplement our Malaysian Chinese, they would also let her watch Mandarin dub Peppa Pig. Lots of it.
I’ll be honest; I have a bit of a complicated relationship with Peppa Pig. I won’t deny that it was delightful to hear her speak Chinese so confidently, picking up lots of short expressions like “哦，我的天啊!” (“Oh my goodness!”) and “好主意!” (“Good idea!”) but it’s equally frustrating to deal with a toddler tantrum every single time we turn it off. My screaming daughter and bedtime don’t mix very well.
She can often get completely enraptured with Peppa Pig, so it’s obvious we can’t make her hate it - we don’t want to either, because the aim is to encourage her! Undoubtedly, letting her watch Mandarin Chinese cartoons (we use Netflix to find them) has dramatically increased her exposure to the language but we also want to make sure she doesn’t get obsessed with television to the point where she neglects reading. What we needed was to strike a balance by managing her digital content exposure so she wouldn’t forget the value of her books. It’ll be the books that will let her have a physical copy of the words and images that she can remember and refer to when she’s learning to apply them in real life. Watching a cartoon will only allow her to apply the sounds while the book can do all in one!
To give her other things to watch that can buffer her Peppa Pig obsession, we’ve found and introduced other videos that can be easily found on YouTube! We’ll leave all the links below so that you can check them out! We can happily say that my daughter (although she still has a particular love for Peppa Pig) will readily watch any of these things very happily! The things we introduced were things that we believed would help her gain knowledge of the world around her. Many of the things involve real-life video and photography (such as Liziqi and all the cooking channels) while others were videos with other children playing and doing various activities. Some of the videos are simply just other people reading books aloud. But all of these are set to prime to her for increasing her knowledge of the world around her, so that when she comes into contact with something she was familiar with in the video, she’ll be able to learn more quickly from it.
With a little discipline, she’s starting to learn that throwing tantrums after digital content is switched off really isn’t an answer to her “problem”. Hopefully this gets better!
There’s a whole TED talk about exposing your children to the correct kind of digital media. Anything too stimulating actually reduces their ability to concentrate for longer periods of time - so actually, finding the right kind of digital content is really important for early development! You can watch it here!
And, as promised, here are the YouTube channel links in no particular order…
Khan Academy Mandarin - teaching Maths in Chinese (starts from very easy topics like counting)
冰糖故事屋 BingTang Story - lots of readings of Chinese children’s books
讚美之泉兒童 Stream of Praise Kids - Mandarin Christian songs for children and some lessons
信誼基金會 - some book reading, children’s activities, etc.
甜悦烘焙 Tinrry Baking - lots of sweet and savoury bakes (yum!)
曼食慢语 Amanda Tastes - cooking channel… adult-friendly, too!
Xiaoying Cuisine - another cooking channel… great food!
Rosalina's Kitchen 蘿潔塔的廚房 - another cooking channel…
小高姐的 Magic Ingredients - another cooking channel… (you can probably guess we really like making food!)
Sometimes we let her watch things with very little/no spoken language in it and just accompany her with it:
李子柒 Liziqi - a family favourite! not much Mandarin spoken but really interesting exposure to Chinese culture and practical skills like cooking, farming, gardening, clothes making
Cooking tree 쿠킹트리 - dessert recipe channel, Korean creator but there isn’t any commentary
조꽁드 Joconde's Baking - another dessert channel, Korean creator with no commentary
HidaMari Cooking - another dessert channel like the above
There are loads of channels that actually don’t use spoken language in any commentaries so they can be quite restful and even informative for children! Our daughter has learnt quite a lot from watching Liziqi!
What do you think? Do you agree with controlling children’s exposure to digital content? What kind of things do you do to increase language exposure that we haven’t covered here? We’d love to hear from you!
For us? I guess the key is always encouraging her to speak Chinese - even watching cartoons!