BaoBeiTalk
A calm storybook for one- to four-year-olds, in Mandarin, English and Bahasa Melayu.
iPhone and iPad. iOS 17 or later. Seven days free.
Most Malaysian children grow up hearing three languages and speaking one.
English is everywhere. It is on the tablet, in the shop, at school, in every song. Mandarin lives in one room of the house, usually the one 婆婆 is sitting in. Bahasa Melayu is somewhere between the two. So the child ends up understanding all three perfectly well and answering all three in English, and by the time anyone notices, the habit is years deep.
BaoBeiTalk is a small, quiet way to put more of the other two languages back into an ordinary day.
A hundred and fifty-three words, thirty-seven sentences, thirty-two stories and three songs, each of them in all three languages. Tap a picture and it says the word, makes its sound, then says something about it.
- Catkucing猫māo
- Appleepal苹果píngguǒ
- Mamamama妈妈māma
- Handtangan手shǒu
- Ballbola球qiú
- Eatmakan吃chī
- Doganjing狗狗gǒugou
- Waterair水shuǐ
- Fishikan鱼yú
- Moonbulan月亮yuèliang
- Bookbuku书shū
- Sleeptidur睡shuì
Real cards from the app. None of them is a quiz.
Then it stops talking
There is a pause after every line, and that gap is the whole design.
The app never asks your child a question. No what’s this?, no can you say it?, nothing to get right, because a question is a test and a child who cannot answer one learns that talking is a test too. It names things instead, and leaves room. Some days nothing comes back. Then one day they say 猫 in the kitchen, about a cat that is not in the app.
In your own voice
You can record any of it yourself, so what your child hears is you and not a stranger. That matters most for the languages a synthetic voice does badly, and for the words that only exist in your family.
Recordings never leave the phone. There is no account to make and nothing to sign in to.
Made to be calm
- Slow scenes, one thing at a time.
- No music stings. Just the voice and the story.
- No autoplay. A page waits for a tap, unless you turn that on.
- No scores, no stars, no streaks, no badges.
- Every session ends and stays ended. Nothing counts down into the next one.
- A daily limit you set, which stops the app rather than nagging, and never mid-sentence.
- Quiet colours. Nothing flashes.
- Every word, story and recording works with no signal.
- Nothing your child does is uploaded anywhere.
Every line above is something you can check by opening the app.
Price
Seven days free. After that a subscription, weekly, monthly or yearly, at whatever the App Store shows in your own currency. Cancel any time in Settings.
It is not trying to be the app your child uses most. It is trying to be the fifteen quiet minutes where they hear their grandmother’s language from someone who loves them.