A few weeks ago, we came across this set of Chinese flash cards at one of the Popular Bookstores, and it caught our eyes immediately.

40 cards at S$7.90 is a good deal to us

We have been wanting to find flash cards featuring real photographs (instead of drawn pictures) with Chinese characters at the back of each card, and this set suited our needs well.

Nicely taken and vibrant photographs

Large Chinese characters with smaller English and Hanyu Pinyin wordings

Besides this particular set, there were also other sets in the same ‘My First Learning Card’ series. However, unlike the set we bought, those focused on particular groups of objects (e.g. food and fruits only). We felt that a set comprising of a variety of objects belonging to different categories would provide more interests and exposure for Darius.

Though the box indicated that the flash cards were intended for toddlers aged 2 to 6, we felt there’s no harm for Darius to start learning early (and having fun and something to do). Interestingly, he’s always showing deep concentration and interests whenever I flash the cards to him.

Darius' favourite card... I wonder why? ^^|

I’ve previously read somewhere that babies’ brains process things faster than us adults in some ways, and they will lose interests quickly if exposed to the same object for too long (definition of ‘long’ here: 6 seconds).

That is why when I flash the cards in front of Darius, I make sure I do it swiftly, showing him the photograph while saying the Chinese character once, and flip the card over to show its Chinese character and voicing out the word again. I will then proceed on with the next card.

So has our flashing of these cards been effective for Darius? Frankly, at his age, we ain’t expecting much, though we strongly believe that whatever he has been exposed to has been absorbed and will be remembered in his brain, though he might not be able to express it yet. This will also aid in his future learning as he grows up.

Furthermore, it has been fun showing the flash cards to him, especially during the ‘assessment time’ after each round of card flashing. ^^|

By assessment, it’s just a simple game whereby I would randomly pick two cards from the pool and hold them in front of him. By voicing out one of the Chinese characters, we will see if Darius could pick out the correct card.

Well, we can’t say he can start recognising the cards already (he’s not even 1 year old yet ^^|), but we always had fun finding out if he would be ‘lucky’ to pick out the right card. We realised he would often select the ‘correct’ card based on his liking of a particular photograph.

Here’s one recent clip of our ‘guessing game’: ^^|

Anyway for readers who were wondering why we decided to expose him to the Chinese language instead of the more common English, you may refer to this post: Language & Reading with Darius

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