No Such Thing as A Tiger

My daughter is at that age where we're trying to get her to learn words and names of things.  She got a picture dictionary for her birthday which she loves, though it's mainly because there's an orange cat on the Pets page.

I thought that I would expand her vocabulary by getting her another one with different content.  I liked it because it has the tabs, which seemed like it would be easier to turn the pages.  And I liked it because it looked like all of the objects would be full pictures of the object- the pictures in My Little Word Book seem to mostly be close-ups of faces.

My question there:  When you see a chicken or a lion, is the face the first thing that you notice?

I know I'm going out on a limb here to say, "No", but it seems that the educational value of this book is somewhat limited to faces of animals and objects.


After reading through these two picture dictionaries for the past 6 months, I have come to some more conclusions:

1. These books are written and edited by people on the US East Coast.
2. There's no such thing as a car.
3. There's no such thing as a flower.

Why do I say that?

Because it seems that the granularity of description of these two books is somewhat inconsistent.

For example:  They say "Puppy", like you see on the cover, but when you look at the fish, it's a "Goldfish".

Not "fish", but "goldfish".

When you look at the cars page, it doesn't just have "Car", it has "sports car", "racing car", but then is just says "car" instead of "coupe" or "sedan" and "bus" instead of "school bus" or "city bus".

When you look at the park page, there's a picture of "a tree", but the neighboring page of flowers has a "cornflower", a "rose", and a "daffodil".

Honestly, who is editing these books?

The pictures should be described to the same level of detail.  Not "a tree" but "a birch tree" or "an oak tree".  They look very different!

You can also tell that the books are from authors and editors on the East Coast because the names of the objects like "sofa" instead of "couch".  And in the My First Words book (which seems to have a capitalization problem in the title), they have a whole page about the beach where they have pinwheels and a picture of an Eastern Seagull.

After going to the beach for 20 years in California, I never had pinwheels on the beach.  They weren't around on the embarcadero, either.  It's more of a Coney Island, East Coast thing.

And, let me be frank, California is big on make-up; even the Seagulls have red lipstick on.  What really bothered me, though, about the books was that when we took them to the zoo with my daughter to help her make the connection, the zoo had a female lion.

Want to guess what gender was in the book?

Both are correct, but the book is teaching the kid that a lion is only a male lion.  It would be better if there were pictures of both the female and male since there are such big gender differences.  I guess the same could be true of cardinals, but you so rarely see the female bird that I guess it's understandable to go with the male picture.

Finally, I had purchased some  Animals flashcards because I thought that they would work well for rote memorization.



Completely different publisher.

Completely different author.

They suffer from the same problems.

They have "baracuda" and "piranha" cards...and they also have "horse" and "tiger".  I think that there might be a few equestrians out there that would strongly disagree with having a single card generically labeled "horse".

And "tigers".  There's really not such thing as a "tiger".  There are Siberian Tigers, Bengal Tigers, South China tigers, Balinese Tigers,  Javan Tigers, Indochinese Tigers, Sumatran Tigers, Caspian Tigers, and Malaysian Tigers.

If you're going to get down to the level of "Rattlesnake" and "Boa Constrictor" for "snake", then you really need to be consistent.