Re Comment about Children learning Mandarin
Regarding a comment by a reader about children learning Mandarin. This has been a bit of a conundrum for me.
First off we don’t have a TV and our kids 2.5 yrs and 7yrs, have extremely limited exposure to any video content at all. This is by design. The 7 yr old is home schooled this year. This is because of our background as science geeks, not due to religious convictions.
For the 2.5 yr old, I was doing 1 hr each way commute with her on Saturday to go to a branch of a Chicago area language school which features parent/tot classes in Mandarin. The teachers were really good, we went to 2 different venues over the course of 6 months. This was 1hr/wk. The 2 yr old is picking up phrases, and the 7yr old was also after hearing us sing songs or ask if something was tasty, during the week. But although I try to reinforce at home, and I think I have very good pronunciation, I’m not fluent enough to “immerse” the kids myself. What I need is a trilingual (Eng, Spanish, Mandarin) nanny whom I could afford.
One problem I had with the Saturday class was that they had obviously adopted the curriculum from their European languages program. This meant there was a lot of singing. I think that’s a great idea for European languages, but for Mandarin, it means we spent significant amounts of time listening to a native speaker and producing language where the tones were washed out. Some of the vocabulary was only learned as part of the songs. The result is you would not know how to speak the words with the correct tone, unless you happened to know the word already as I often (but not always) did. I would propose anywhere there was singing, to use instead rhyming chants for a kids mandarin class, where they could still be inclined to memorize fun stuff. You could do stuff with body movements too. Kindermusik has this worked out to a science in the child’s mother tongue. What I need is a Mandarin Kindermusik teacher to teach my kids Mandarin.
Because of the commute and the issue with too much (in my opinion) singing I am trying to get another group going and looking for another teacher, closer to home.
For an adult beginner I would recommend the mandarin course at http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/Chinese.aspx. These will not be appropriate for your kids. For that probably muzzy would be fine from everything I’ve heard of it. Haidong Ji thinks it’s good, which is good enough for me. I've only listened to a few tapes in the fsi course, and what impressed me is that they were really serious about tones from the get go. For kids, they can probably just pick it up, but for adult learners, in my opinion, it helps to treat learning them as if you were taking up a new musical instrument, i.e. your singing voice – but you are using your voice in ways that you have never before. Also, you have to train your ear in ways you haven’t had to listen (to yourself) before. The level of frustration and work this takes for an adult is probably like taking up a musical instrument from scratch such as violin or flute. I am just guessing since I have not taken up a new instrument as an adult, but I did learn violin from 3rd grade until college. The thought of taking up, say, a wind instrument (i.e. from scratch) is as daunting as thinking about learning Arabic (although fsi offers that too.) No one on any discussion board says they wish they had paid less attention to tones at the beginning. This has been and is still being thrashed out every which way on chinese-forums.com.
We have some tapes for kids too, but they are kind of mind numbing, although the 2.5 yr old sometimes requests them in the car. What I've seen of the learning materials for kids is quite discouraging, and I've spent a lot of time looking. Muzzy looks expensive compared to other stuff, but it's probably worth it, based on the BBC brand, the other languages they developed material for, and Haidong Ji's recommendation. I've talked to Haidong in person and so I value his opinion of this more than for example that of a sales rep from chinasprout. Of course the same approach will not work for all kids. One has to expect some hit and miss. Still it is frustrating to work this out for oneself while the clock ticks on one's kid's window of opportunity.
First off we don’t have a TV and our kids 2.5 yrs and 7yrs, have extremely limited exposure to any video content at all. This is by design. The 7 yr old is home schooled this year. This is because of our background as science geeks, not due to religious convictions.
For the 2.5 yr old, I was doing 1 hr each way commute with her on Saturday to go to a branch of a Chicago area language school which features parent/tot classes in Mandarin. The teachers were really good, we went to 2 different venues over the course of 6 months. This was 1hr/wk. The 2 yr old is picking up phrases, and the 7yr old was also after hearing us sing songs or ask if something was tasty, during the week. But although I try to reinforce at home, and I think I have very good pronunciation, I’m not fluent enough to “immerse” the kids myself. What I need is a trilingual (Eng, Spanish, Mandarin) nanny whom I could afford.
One problem I had with the Saturday class was that they had obviously adopted the curriculum from their European languages program. This meant there was a lot of singing. I think that’s a great idea for European languages, but for Mandarin, it means we spent significant amounts of time listening to a native speaker and producing language where the tones were washed out. Some of the vocabulary was only learned as part of the songs. The result is you would not know how to speak the words with the correct tone, unless you happened to know the word already as I often (but not always) did. I would propose anywhere there was singing, to use instead rhyming chants for a kids mandarin class, where they could still be inclined to memorize fun stuff. You could do stuff with body movements too. Kindermusik has this worked out to a science in the child’s mother tongue. What I need is a Mandarin Kindermusik teacher to teach my kids Mandarin.
Because of the commute and the issue with too much (in my opinion) singing I am trying to get another group going and looking for another teacher, closer to home.
For an adult beginner I would recommend the mandarin course at http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/Chinese.aspx. These will not be appropriate for your kids. For that probably muzzy would be fine from everything I’ve heard of it. Haidong Ji thinks it’s good, which is good enough for me. I've only listened to a few tapes in the fsi course, and what impressed me is that they were really serious about tones from the get go. For kids, they can probably just pick it up, but for adult learners, in my opinion, it helps to treat learning them as if you were taking up a new musical instrument, i.e. your singing voice – but you are using your voice in ways that you have never before. Also, you have to train your ear in ways you haven’t had to listen (to yourself) before. The level of frustration and work this takes for an adult is probably like taking up a musical instrument from scratch such as violin or flute. I am just guessing since I have not taken up a new instrument as an adult, but I did learn violin from 3rd grade until college. The thought of taking up, say, a wind instrument (i.e. from scratch) is as daunting as thinking about learning Arabic (although fsi offers that too.) No one on any discussion board says they wish they had paid less attention to tones at the beginning. This has been and is still being thrashed out every which way on chinese-forums.com.
We have some tapes for kids too, but they are kind of mind numbing, although the 2.5 yr old sometimes requests them in the car. What I've seen of the learning materials for kids is quite discouraging, and I've spent a lot of time looking. Muzzy looks expensive compared to other stuff, but it's probably worth it, based on the BBC brand, the other languages they developed material for, and Haidong Ji's recommendation. I've talked to Haidong in person and so I value his opinion of this more than for example that of a sales rep from chinasprout. Of course the same approach will not work for all kids. One has to expect some hit and miss. Still it is frustrating to work this out for oneself while the clock ticks on one's kid's window of opportunity.
posted by kudra at 11:51 PM
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