Learning Chinese is very difficult and very overwhelming at first. I probably did it wrong in many ways at first, I was very excited and with a lot of enthusiasm tried to teach my children (3 and 5) how to speak Chinese right away. But I saw that my children were not getting it. My 5 year old son told me he hates Chinese, Chinese doesn't make sense. It made me want to give up many times. But I really had to go back to basics, put away all the books at first and started with the most basic tenet: Make it fun.
Making it fun - Learning some vocabularies
I bought a few DVDs but the best ones which totally caught my children's attention and finally my kids said "Chinese is fun" are this set of DVDs: Culture Cubs - there are a total of 3. I wish they made more. The DVDs are very well made for the audience accustomed to Nick Jr, Noggins. It's about 2 bears - one Panda, one North American brown bear, who are friends as they journey to learn Chinese. The videos are very colorful, upbeat, the animations are great. The songs are catchy. They don't teach sentences nor grammar. 90% of the video are spoken in English so it really is a gentle introduction to Chinese. But it teaches many vocabularies, including the topics of the video (eating, animals or sea animals) plus counting, colors, body parts. My children are now much more advanced and can speak some sentences. But they still refer back to vocabularies they learned in Culture Cubs. Some of the DVDs came with flash cards, I never really used them as flash cards, but they play with each other as the Memory game. I give it 5+ stars and highly recommend. I know there are some people who wrote on Amazon that the DVDs do not teach enough vocabularies, the video spent too much time on scenes which might not be 100% teaching, but I feel those scenes are all part of the charm of the video to make it fun, to create a Chinese learning experience. I know it might not appeal to the more Asian style of education which is more drilling oriented and feel the video has to be crammed with information to be worthwhile. I have bought other more rigorous DVDs as well but my children do not like them, they are too dry. The key here is not to cram in lots of info but to make them interested, make them excited to learn. Once they are excited, it's much easier to remember and my kids come asking for more - which is what we want. 5+ stars for Culture Cubs!
Culture Cubs - Time to Eat - teaches about different food items likes pizza, rice, noodles, etc
Culture Cubs - Time to Meet the Animals - teaches many animals: tiger, panda, dog, cat, etc.
Culture Cubs - Time to Swim - teaches sea animals like jelly fish, shark, sea stars, etc
How old to start?
I started my daughter at around 3 years old and thought that is the ideal age to start. Some people of course say you should start a foreign language as early as possible. I would agree if someone in your home is a native speaker. Obviously speak to your baby as soon as they are born. But we are not native nor fluent speaker of Chinese, speaking a complete sentence is a struggle for myself and my husband. So learning Chinese is more like study. So we thought at around 3, we started her on the Culture Cubs DVDs to get her into it. Then at 3.5 years old, I started her with a Preschooler course (see my next blog) to learn Chinese via books and tapes. I thought it was actually really perfect.
While my son was already almost 5 years old (4.75)when I suddenly thought he needed to learn Chinese! I feel that is a little late. Of course it's really never too late. There are many introductory materials to learn Chinese catered to all ages. But once you get past the introductory level. It's difficult to find age appropriate materials. For instance my son is now 6 years old and he can now start to read Chinese story books which have about 1 sentence a page (see my Kindergarten Reading Blog). But I searched high and low and most Chinese story books with pictures and 1 sentence a page are all for babies to 2 or 3 years old. The topics are so baby-ish, my son thought he's too big for that and has no interest in reading them. In English books, he's reading chapter books like Magic Tree House, Magic School Bus, Dinosaur Cove and books about Star Wars, Spiderman, Batman, etc. We went to Shenzhen (China) and he picked out some Chinese super hero books and some Chinese dinosaur books, but it was way beyond his and my reading level! I had to spend hours at night to translate word by word just one page to read to him. So now my hope is that we will learn together quickly to catch up to the reading level of the topics he's interested in.
Next Blog
After this, ready for Preschool Chinese...
No comments:
Post a Comment