Website: Chinese Lessons for Children

 My last few posts have definitely gotten into rant territory, so I wanted to move away from that for a moment and share a website I really like for learning Chinese. The website is designed with children in mind (but of course, adults who are beginners at Chinese can also get something out of it), which is no surprise since learning Chinese and Chinese immersion programs seem to be the new trend childhood education in the United States. This fun (and free) website contains 42 beginners lessons using interactive Adobe Flash videos, each centered around a theme. The first one, 你好 (How are you) mostly has school kids sharing some basic greetings. All the Chinese text is written in Simplified Chinese characters and includes pinyin above it to aid in learning the pronunciation (for more information on Chinese characters, you can read this previous blog post).

 

You can't tell from these screenshots, but each slide is animated. Besides the written dialogue, it also contains audio where the dialogue is pronounced. There are also sometimes sound effects or music.

  

At the end of each lesson is a screen or two that reviews the vocabulary used in the lesson. If you scroll over the character, it will pronounce it again, making it easier to repeat and review. It also helps to have an online Chinese dictionary if you want to look up any of the characters. Again, I recommend the one at zhongwen.com.

We were talking about putting my four-year old into a Chinese immersion program, so I started using this with him to see if he'd be interested. He seems to like it, though I must confess I haven't done it in a while and probably need to start doing it again more regularly. This is a crucial age to expose him to different things like languages, so I need to get back on that. What I really need to do is see if he'll enjoy using it and learn from it by himself, since he's also starting to discover the computer and wants to play on it all the time. Still, even without using the site for a while, he does remember the phrase 再见, which means good-bye, and he even pronounces it with the correct tones. So with that, I wish you all good-bye as well. 

再见!