Hacker Cinema
Dora the Explorer
2000 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 8 seasons
Created by Valerie Walsh, Eric Weiner, Chris Gifford
ActionAdventureAnimationFamilyKids
A young girl named Dora goes on adventures with her red boot-wearing monkey named Boots.
1 mixed5 neutralfrom 6 commenters
Where to watch
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6 comments on Hacker News
One possibility is to watch movies with subtitles, bu increasing he difficulty with time:
German sound + English subtitles
German sound + German subtitles
German sound + no subtitles
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If you can get them, some cartons like Dora the Explorer or Pepa Pig have a very slow pace and may be helpful.
I've heard this argument before, mostly from companies trying to sell language courses for kids. As far as I know it's true that kids pick up on languages much easier when they're young, but I'm not so sure those skills will stick if all they can converse with are the TV. That's quite different from having a speaking partner such as a teacher or a bilingual parent. I suspect this is why shows like Dora the Explorer are set up like an interactive game.
I myself have been exposed to subtitled English shows and movies all my life (not every show or movie was dubbed, and there were some German shows that made it through as well) but I don't think I actually started speaking any English until I needed it to interact with strangers in Runescape, while at the same time I stopped watching any dubbed shows. Almost all of the content I consumed became English language content.
Almost passively learning a language by enveloping oneself in it works (though actual study will help you advance quicker), but you need more than TV. I can't find the actual paper I read on this once (thanks, SEO spam!) but as I recall, the biggest advantage kids have to is learn pronunciation without an accent; picking up vocabulary and grammar don't seem to be too affected by age from what I recall.
Yup, I think a lot of commenters here are taking this literally at face value. I got 2 kids of my own and I get the "vibe", or direction/intent, Taiwan's lawmakers are going for. They know they can't enforce it; they're just trying to suggest "Look, don't just plop your baby/toddler in front of a Youtube Playlist of 200+ Dora-the-explorer & Barney episodes all day. It's not good for adults and it certainly isn't good for a new developing mind. Yes, we know there are educational apps 'n all that... but you know and we know that's what most of you are sedating your kids with on those glowing glossy screens. Let them look around and process their environment & interact with real humans in the room. Dora & Barney are great, but not replacements for real flesh & blood human interaction and the real world environment around them.".
Of course, depending on your social-economic level, this is __far__ easier to do for some parents than others. I'm lucky with my flexible high-earning techjob my wife only works 2 days a week. We have a great deal more time to actually go outside and walk around in nice parks with the kids. Very different from the parents that work crazy hours, _SIX_ days a week and barely have time to sleep before having to go back to work - not to talk of having time with their kids.
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Pre-emptive: At about this time, in previous similar discussions, someone on HN will say: "Well, why did they have kids if they can't take care of them?" I think this thread handles it well - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177756
My son will never have a TV or computer in his room. We will severely limit his TV intake and computer usage. We are active adults, hiking, biking, YMCA events, and will include our son in as much outside activities as possible.
That said, I think it's silly to go to such an extreme and do "zero" screen time. My wife regularly let's my 15 month old play Fischer Price games and he's probably watched three or four Dora the Explorer episodes and a handful of Nihau Kai-Lan shows and maybe a couple Curious George shows. He doesn't seem to be able to watch an entire episode for the most part, and he is still way ahead on development milestones.
Could he be further along? Who knows, he could be further behind. I think it is as bad to be neurotic about these things as neglectful and uncaring to be honest.
Our netflix usage is 99.5% kids shows. Pretty much all the PBS cartoons are on there, NOVA Science now is on there, Thomas and Friends, Dora the Explorer etc. We use hundreds of GB every month streaming media and have no plans on going back to cable or satellite. My wife can get some of her shows via hulu at her desk, some of them on the TV and if she is patient she'll get a whole season at once on netflix.
That being said, we'd use even more bandwidth with Netflix if their on demand streaming selection didn't suck for more recent releases. I don't watch a ton of older movies and those I do want to watch over and over again I own on DVD or Bluray which I would prefer to use since the quality is better and there's never any buffering problems.
It's certainly the largest single source of internet traffic at our house, and within that subset, streaming Dora the Explorer Season 1 is the largest single source of internet traffic coming from Netflix.