My friends wanted their toddler to learn her first words in English, German and Vietnamese, but they couldn't find any good books for this combination. So I decided to help them by creating an app for their "first words" journey.

The app is like a customisable board book:

A realistic picture on the left page, then the word in 1 to 4 languages of your choice on the right page. When you tap on the picture, it changes and a realistic sound is played. The words can also be read out loud using text to speech.

I used Midjourney to create "photos" for each word.

- I chose this style because realistic images have been shown to help toddlers the most with real-world recognition. Detailed illustrations would have the same benefit, but it was too difficult to get a consistent style.

- Most photos were generated in a few tries. Generating a dinner knife, a potty and the correct number of objects was quite difficult. A single banana was impossible for me. Even with image prompts I could only create pairs.

Translations were done manually using dictionaries, and some languages were double-checked by native speakers.

- Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese and Korean also show their romanisation to help non-native readers.

Hope you too find the app useful.