Chinese for Children

For reasons specific to our family, I decided that I wanted to learn Mandarin Chinese and I want my daughters to learn it too. For a while we met with a Chinese playgroup run by a Chinese speaking mom, but then the kids became school age and the playgroup disbanded. I enrolled in a Chinese as a foreign language class at a local Chinese Saturday school, but for several reasons that school isn't a good fit for the girls.

When I looked into Chinese programs, other people discouraged me from trying to teach Chinese without a native speaker, citing the difficulty with the tones. So, for a long time Sparkle didn't learn any Chinese because I didn't have a teacher for her. She knew a few things from the playgroup, but I found that it was slipping from her mind quickly and she never really understood several phrases that she had learned by rote.

Finally I decided to take the plunge and teach her myself, even though I don't know Chinese myself. I know that I'm garbling the tones with her, but the alternative right now is for her to not learn Chinese at all.

I'm teaching Sparkle using the textbook "Er Tong Han Yu" (also called Chinese for Children, but not to be confused with the other books and programs with the same name in English). The book comes with a recording of the lesson so she can hear the language. It includes age appropriate vocabulary, simple grammar, and pin yin drill. However, the book is almost all in pinyin, and it is important to me that she learn characters from the beginning, so we are using a copy that I typed in simplified characters. Here are the original textbook (cover and inner pages) and the copy I transcribed.



I try to work on Chinese a little bit (5-10 minutes) each day. We listen to a lesson on the iPod while Sparkle follows along.



I drill vocabulary flashcards. If Sparkle knows a word at once, great. If not, I tell her and we move on. We used to do all the cards every day, but when we got to 30+ words, it became too cumbersome to drill all of them, so I started a spaced repetition system using a box and tabbed dividers.


I'm still working on a good way to practice creating original sentences in Chinese. I believe that creating original sentences with the actual characters is important because it helps make the mental connection between the character, the sound, and the meaning. It also helps practice and test grammar concepts. Seeing all the characters at once and being able to move them around also makes it easier to demonstrate grammatical concepts, such as different word orders. I also believe that it is best to have some sort of prompt for creating sentences, such as a story or a picture. It is difficult to come up with an original thought as well as an original sentence, and the student will likely come up with something that is beyond her ability or doesn't practice the appropriate concept. My current method involves cutting up little bits of paper, each with one word, and re-arranging them. I hope that it will continue to work.


Overall, I'm very proud of the progress Sparkle has made. After about two months, she can recognize 30+ words (simplified characters). She understands what the tones are, even if neither of us can produce them correctly. She can construct a simple sentence (within her vocabulary). She can ask and answer simple questions (within her vocabulary).