211–220 of 337 posts
This is fun, but wouldn't some second hand Blu Rays have been simpler?
I know Blu-Rays can take a bit more than a CD, but even they won't stand up to a 2yo.
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Every parent is required to say they only allow very limited screen time even if secretly they all allow quite a bit more.
Plenty of parents do use screens responsibly. My five year old can watch one episode of whichever series he is watching at the moment after school (currently Hilda , which Netflix really should push harder than some of the crap that gets suggested). In the weekends sometimes we allow for one film instead. It's not a challenge to keep a limit on screen time at this age.
Good for you.
It is, however, a challenge for us.
If all your friends have the same rules as you, then great. If all your friends have no rules at all, you are a tyrant, and your child will be at his friends places as much as possible.
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The author is apparently a Dutch speaker, and English fluency really isn't a problem in Flanders or the Netherlands. I think the language is close enough to English that it's easily picked up even watching only dubbed movies as a kid. In contrast friends of mine who mostly watched French-dubbed movies when they were small (because they were close to the border and Club Dorothée was better than whatever was available…
As a French-speaking Belgian living in the Dutch speaking part, in my experience and opinion, it's the opposite. Most French speaking folks can't speak a word of English because everything is dubbed, they are never exposed to the language. Meanwhile, there's no Dutch dubbing (because there's not enough Dutch speaking audience to justify the cost) and they all have fantastic English skills.
I'm pretty sure the ease of speaking English for Dutch speakers comes mostly from the closeness of the language (as evidenced by my comment on people who watched French-dubbed anime as kids, not Japanese original or English-dubbed). And TV content for children (including De leeuwenkoning or Een luizenleven, to take examples from the article) is almost universally dubbed in Dutch as far as I can tell.
My personal opinion is that watching movies in English is really not as useful as people think it is, it does help once you already know the language but children just don't pick up a language by watching movies in that language without having already some basic knowledge of that language.
IMO (but it's starting to get off-topic) it's more generally Latin languages that are a hindrance for their native speakers for some reason, and globally Latin speakers are just always bad at learning other (non-Latin) languages, especially at speaking them. But it's not because they're watching Le Roi Lion rather than The Lion King.
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We don't do this either (I hardly look at the thing at home), but just a look at the other parents bringing in their preschoolers at school is depressing. Half of them have their phone out, and the number of parents you see pushing a pram or stroller with a phone in front of them is absurd. We are a minority.
It is truly bizarre, I agree! Everything to chase a bit of dopamine. And if you peer over and look at what they're browsing, it's mostly junk, social media videos or just mindless scrolling. It's actually healthier for the brain to be bored in such moments.
This is so cool! I do something similar for music - I have posters up for albums, and a small NFC tag is embedded behind the poster, so tapping my phone to the poster’s corner and clicking the notification begins playing it immediately. I really want to make a collection of cassette-or-record-style plastic cards with album art and NFC tags, and hook it up to a speaker, so I can place my album on a pedestal and it sta…
Amazing write up and work in general putting this together - this is such an ideal form of the word "hack" in its incredibly low cost, durability, and usefulness. I was staggered when I saw your build cost list - I know ESPs are in the realm of "Cheap AF" but all of those NFC cards also for $9?! This is one of the few reasons I would shop Alibaba! We're talking around $15 total for the full NFC setup if you can print…
> And finally, if you're a non-English speaker, Blu-rays will include a dubbed version in your native language. This is a big plus for the kids, especially when they're as young as mine are now. I grew up in a country where English is not the primary language spoken and when I was young all the cool shows and movies were in English. As a kid this was a huge incentive and went far above and beyond any education I had…
for me it was computer games, specifically Civ 2. Imagine playing that as a second-grader with zero English. But I had strong motivation, and ploughed through the game, dictionary in hand.
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When I was 14-18 I watched anime (japanese dubs with eng subs). The censorship of the german dubs got me into it and I hated german subs plus the english subs were faster and the germans often were double translated (jap > eng > ger). My english grades were very good thanks to it. Now I'm exposed more to english (movies, shows, internet, os) than german I've switched to german subs and started watching anime again 20…
Would you have recommendations for an English speaker trying to learn German? Where do I go to find anime with good German subtitles? Or, maybe even a German dub?
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I use "NFC Tools" to write the URL, which I copy the album/song URL from Spotify and embed it. When I hold my phone near it, the URL appears in the notifications, and clicking it opens it in Spotify, which then starts playing it. I have a bag of 100 tags I got from a friend so no shortage there.
Love the simplicity of this. Out of interest, do you trigger just the web player or is there a URL pattern that can launch onto a specific device?
This is so cool! I do something similar for music - I have posters up for albums, and a small NFC tag is embedded behind the poster, so tapping my phone to the poster’s corner and clicking the notification begins playing it immediately. I really want to make a collection of cassette-or-record-style plastic cards with album art and NFC tags, and hook it up to a speaker, so I can place my album on a pedestal and it sta…
I'd love to do something similar for myself, but having never worked with NFC I see there are tons of different options. Would you mind mentioning what tags you got?