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.