I am a single self-employed mom, so I sympathise with time constraints. The funny thing is, I use this to my advantage with the languages: I don’t think my son even knows that Dora the Explorer comes in a language other than Mandarin(with English where the English has Spanish).
My son is 3, and was adopted from China. I had just done a wee bit of self-taught mandarin when I brought him home at 22 mos. He was just babybabbling, not speaking, and I don’t think he had ever seen ANY book before that.
So he had to learn English, French (we are here in Quebec, both of which I speak quite well) and I am trying to keep up Chinese. So I got Little Pim (excellent), Baby Learns Chinese, EarlyStart (BaoBei the Panda), Sing and Learn with Mei Mei. I swear I learn more from these little kid dvds than i do from adult lessons! (most from childbook.com, some from amazon)
For English, I used Baby Signing Time and SigningTime, which of course taught him signing as well… again, I learned while he did.
When I found that the baby/toddler dvds were repetitive, I searched online and found his fave series: Bob the Builder and Dora the Explorer in Mandarin (ebay, and bogeji.com )
Anyways, he begs to watch these things, and I put them on while I am cooking meals, cleaning, and if I need to catch a little bit of shuteye after working all night. If you can hear or see them while cooking etc, you’ll learn too. So, funnily enough the same thing I use to occupy him when I don’t have time is what he learns the other language from.
I’ll often sing little songs I got from the dvds while pushing him in the stroller, or point out things or quiz vocab while walking the dog with him… really, we are learning the SAME vocab at the same time.
Also, funnily enough, a contractor who worked at our place had a girlfriend from Beijing, and I pay her $20 to come for an hour or so once a week to speak to both of us. I learn practical phrases like " Baobao ying gai niao niao" “Baby must peepee” from her! And he hears a native speaker. Again, she comes to our home, and I do things like give him his bath, cook supper etc, and she says what I am doing, and I and he repeat it. So it doesn’t take a lot of extra time. She has become a friend and my son is excited to learn Chinese since she speaks it and so does Dora the Explorer! LOL!
