I'm Learning / Raising a bilingual child
For parentsRaising a bilingual child, and where an app fits
Small children pick up a second language more easily than adults, but not from a screen alone. Here is what the research points to, and the narrow slice where an app genuinely helps.
What actually does the work
Language comes from interaction. A child learns from being spoken to, answered, and corrected gently by someone who is paying attention. Screens do not do that part, and no app should claim otherwise.
What small children are unusually good at is sound. Long before they can form sentences they can hear that a word is different, and copy it. That window is wide open in the first years and narrows later, which is why an early start is worth something even if the vocabulary itself is small.
Where an app is useful
An app is good at repetition without impatience. It can say the same word in the same accent for the fortieth time without sighing, which is exactly the thing a tired parent cannot do. It is also good at exposure to a language nobody in the house speaks: if you want your child to hear Spanish and you do not speak Spanish, a recording is better than nothing.
What it is not good at is conversation, correction, or meaning that depends on context. Treat it as a source of sound and pictures, and do the talking yourself.
Setting it up
In I'm Learning the language of the app and the language your child is learning are two separate settings. That sounds like a small detail and it is the whole point: you can keep the menus in the language you read, while your child hears the language you want them to pick up.
All eight languages, English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese, are recorded by a real voice for every one of the 80 words. You can switch the learning language whenever you like without losing what your child has collected.