Bilingual Baby

Bilingual Baby English-Russian is an exciting set of pictures and words covering the main areas of reality familiar to babies from birth: Food, colors, shapes, household objects, objects in the street, the human body, faces, people, animals, birds, and fish.

This iPad-only app features 50 photo panels showing objects in a clear high-contrast way to enable babies to recognize the 3-dimensional nature of each object and have an idea of the texture and true color of each one.

Each photo panel is captioned in English and Russian. Touch the English words and the app speaks the caption in English (standard TV-Radio pronunciation). Touch the Russian caption to hear the words spoken in Russian (standard Moscow pronunciation).

Bilingual Baby English-Russian has a very clean interface: Swiping takes you to the next panel. A menu button takes you back to the main menu of the app.

The content of the app focuses on objects a baby may actually see in the household or on the street. We meticulously avoided things that have a wide range of design variations. For example, there are so many shapes of baby rattles that if you show your child a rattle that
doesn’t look like his/her rattle, it doesn’t teach anything about the correlation of the shape with the word. Nor will the baby associate the object in the picture with something familiar from the household or the street.

Selecting food, we included only the items most common in family refrigerators of North America, Europe, and Russia. Foods such as apples, pears, bananas, etc. We made certain these items are within the diet of babies under 1 year old, so that there is a high likelihood you already have these items in your kitchen for your own food preparation for your baby.

Selecting birds and animals we selected the most common species - sparrow, pigeon, squirrel, cat and dog of typical coloration - animals your baby is likely to see in a park, in the street, at home, or in the countryside. We did not include any exotic or less common animals unlikely to appear on the streets and in the parks of North American, European, or Russian cities.

We followed through with this strategy for item selection in all the categories.

The photo images were selected for their clarity, high contrast, and attention to texture. Through our research and personal experiences raising a bilingual baby we realized that while most baby books and apps feature cartoon characters and other creatures and objects drawn by artists, a baby actually needs a much more realistic presentation of images if they are to actually start recognizing the objects -- connecting pictures to reality. While cartoon characters and swirls of artistic color are fun and may excite your baby, they are not optimal for actual language teaching, especially if your baby is exposed to two languages simultaneously.

The Bilingual Baby English-Russian app for iPad will be especially helpful if you are traveling with your baby. It is colorful, entertaining, and has the quality of a well-designed baby book. It is perfect for a situation where one of the parents, a nanny or baby-sitter speaks only English, or only Russian. That individual will be able to entertain and teach the baby in both languages by playing the caption recordings of our app.