Chinese Made Easy for Kids, review

We have officially finished all four of the Chinese Made Easy for Kids books.  We started when DD was 4, and I know a little Mandarin from about 4 years of Chinese School as a kid.  My parents never spoke Mandarin at home.  My father is fluent but my mother speaks Mandarin like Peter Sellers  of Pink Panther fame, speaks French.  That is, very badly.  She learned from watching movies, I think.

DD has been diligently working on her Mandarin for about 15 minutes every weekday.  We broke it down to approximately one textbook exercise and 3 written exercises a day.  For the tracing exercises I counted 3 characters as one "exercise".  About half way through the first book, I realized that the curriculum was really light on review.  I added my own review lessons about every five lessons thereafter.

Everyone always wants to know if DD is fluent.  She is far from it.  However, she has what I would call a good start.  She has a pretty impressive receptive language vocabulary of about 300 words.  She can speak sentences--stilted, but composed on her own, not just formulaic conversations.  Her topics are limited--food, personal appearance, furniture, school, pets/zoo animals, nationality and language, plus a smattering of other topics.  One cannot expect to get to fluency on 15 minutes a day, especially in a nonimmersion environment.  She can also read and write a limited amount.  She is familiar with pin yin and with counting strokes, which will get her far with a dictionary.

The strengths of this series are that it is very kid friendly and age appropriate.  The topics are things that kids would like to learn to talk about in Chinese.  The font is nice and big so that the learner can really see the strokes in the characters. The exercises are helpful and draw attention to radicals and simple words, which are the key to learning larger numbers of characters.   The illustrations are pretty funny too.

The downside of this series is that you really have to know some Chinese to teach it.  It doesn't ever really explain the grammar it is trying to teach.  You just get some sentences and have to figure out why they are put together that way for yourself.  There are some great resources out on the Internet  for this, so it's not a terrible loss.  However, it is definitely not a self teaching curriculum if you don't know any Chinese and don't have access to someone who does.  The lack of review can be a problem.  The company does publish flash cards and using these regularly would definitely help retention as the exercises do not revisit topical vocabulary very often.  We had our own flashcards (not from this curriculum) and reviewed them daily.

Overall, I was pleased with the progress DD made using Chinese Made Easy for Kids and am using it with DS as well.

Easy Steps to Chinese, Book 3, review

We got our curriculum in the mail this past week, Easy Steps to Chinese, Book 3, by Yamin Ma and Xinying Li.  This is step 2 of the curriculum and at first glance, one can see that compared to Easy Chinese for Kids, also by Yamin Ma, this series is going to be little more intense.

Looking forward, it seems like this curriculum is aimed at children in the middle years. Compared to the first step, it requires writing and typing, and while the pinyin is present for new vocabulary, it expects you to read the rest of the characters without pinyin after the introductory dialogue.

We have not purchased the teacher's manual.  Mainly this was to avoid the extra expense, but also to force me to really learn the material.

Compared to ECFK, this curriculum has a lot of similar vocabulary, but definitely adds some more age appropriate vocabulary as well.  There are more abstract nouns and more words about things middle schoolers can relate to, such as "geography" and "bill" (as in, at a restaurant) and "manager".  There are more reading comprehension passages and many more written exercises. 

While the textbook states that the lessons are designed to take about one school year, about 3 hours per week, the lessons are not divided into daily work.  This provides flexibility for programs of study which include either daily Chinese or Chinese through the whole year.  However, there are 5 units and each unit contains a review and a unit test. 

This curriculum does not appear to be self teaching.  However, if your child has a good ear, there is an accompanying CD, and by this level, he or she should be able to hear whether their pronunciation is accurate or not by comparing with the CD.  A classroom  or tutoring situation where speaking is practiced with a person who can correct tones and speech would be ideal, however.

The curriculum does not really go into Chinese culture in great detail, aside from linguistic points, such as the fact that Chinese people name each family member separately.  A separate Chinese culture curriculum is necessary to round out Chinese studies and to prepare for the AP exam or living in China.