Field note: adapted from a Korean diary entry published on 31 May 2024, days before our daughter arrived. We paid for the set ourselves — the original post is labelled naedon-naesan (내돈내산), "my money, my purchase," the phrase Korean bloggers use to mark that nothing was supplied or sponsored. The entry was a single paragraph. I have not added events to it.
Almost everything we had bought for her by that point was equipment. A carrier, a bath set, cloths, detergent. Then a box of books, which was the odd one out.
I Did Not Know This Existed
Until another mother mentioned it, I had not known this was a product you could buy. It is a boxed set of English picture books that come packaged with songs, published in Korea by JY Books.
That is how the category works when you are pregnant for the first time. Entire aisles have been operating without you, and you find them because somebody mentions one in passing.
One Recommendation, One Payment
The recommendation came from a mother I trusted, someone already through this once. I did not compare sets, read reviews or wait for a sale. She said it was good and I paid on the spot.
Written down now, that sounds reckless, and it was. It was also a relief. So many baby purchases had begun with a vocabulary I did not know; this one began and ended with a recommendation from someone I trusted.
The Catch Was in the Description
My own phrase for it in the original entry was that this was a book that needed my effort. That was the part I had registered, and it is the reason the purchase stuck in my memory.
You do not hand this set to a baby. Someone has to read it, play the songs and sing along, repeatedly. It is not an object that occupies a child while an adult does something else.
In other words, the box came with homework for us. That was the catch I had understood before paying, but only just.
So We Agreed to Do It Together
What made that feel survivable was that a few of us started at the same time and said we would work at it as a group. I wrote that down too, in the cheerful way you write things before you have tried them.
The Line I Ended On
The entry finished with a joke at our own expense: that my husband and I would have to study the set ourselves before we could use it with her. It was a joke and it was accurate. Neither of us was going to sing along confidently at the first attempt.
Then one more line, about the illustrations being lovely. That was the whole post.
I am not going to claim anything here about what English books do or do not do for an infant, because I did not buy them on that basis and I have no way to measure it. I bought them because someone I trusted said so, because they were nice to look at, and because it felt good to have something waiting for her that was not a piece of equipment.
Sources checked
Last reviewed August 29, 2026.
- Original Korean diary – our baby's first book set — Banggujin Naver Blog
- JY Books, publisher of the Hello Nobuyoung series — JY Books
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