Using Chinese News Channel for studying Chinese Mandarin

We are currently learning Mandarin as our second language in homeschooling. We started with Afrikaans, as we are based in South Africa, but with our intention of relocating to China in the future, we decided that it would be better to prepare ourselves.  Especially as Chinese Mandarin is a complex language and takes a long time to master.

*  We started with Mandarin Rosetta Stone for Homeschoolers (and I reviewed it in a very positive light initially - as we were still very new at using it) but I have found that our children needed something else because it became a little monotonous after a while.  It's also a fairly expensive option for us, as we had to pay import costs and packaging, which isn't a problem if you live in North America.  We still use it but it's no longer our primary resource.  Though to be fair, I also know that children go through seasons of learning and sometimes they just need a change.
*  We are using Memrise and we are all still enjoying this.  Learning Chinese characters is fascinating and engaging and we are daily adding words to our vocabulary.  The fun part for the children is to stay ahead of mom:) (why do children always love this?)
*  Chinese movies and programs has added some fun to their learning and now that we are learning to read and write Chinese characters, we try and see how many characters we can recognise at the bottom of each page.

Our latest discovery though, has been CCTV News - Chinese Television.   (We have it on our DSTV package in South Africa, and though we are only connected to DSTV for the SABC and etv channels, it's one of those channels which are included because they are free.)

They also have their own website and this is where we found some resources to use.

Growing up with Chinese

This is a series of lessons for the beginner (100 lessons).  There are also lessons for the intermediate learner as well as the more advanced learner.  The videso takes you through a lesson which includes some basic vocabulary, sentences as well as the associated cultural norms. It includes a transcript of the lesson so that you can practice your Pinyin, Character writing and Mandarin conversation.  I let my children re-enact the same conversation in their own way which has often had us laughing so much, we could barely speak at times.

As part of our studies and curriculum outline, it is important to include Chinese cultural studies. We found a lovely resource on the the same website.

Journeys in Time

The website seems to archive the programs screened on the telly.  We watch this program at 8.30am every day Tuesday to Saturday and so far we have covered topics like micro-art, secrets of agar wood(which is more valuable than gold), goldfish breeding and filigree inlay. It's only 30 minutes long but offers a wealth of enriching and inspiring content.

Having a variety of approaches definitely seems to be beneficial to learning the language and to stay motivated.

There are so many good Chinese Mandarin resources online.  It has taken me some time to find some of them, but when I do, I like sharing them as it will hopefully save you some time and energy.

Have fun learning Mandarin!

Mandarin Chinese Curriculum as a guideline for homeschooling

With learning Mandarin Chinese as a second language - its difficult exactly to know where to start, what a child should or should not be able to do at a specific grade, what the learning outcomes must be.  I spent hours researching on the Internet and have found a few resources which act as a guide for me to work with.

 Dulwich College Shanghai

Ohio Department of Education

I have found these are useful curriculum guides.  It gives me something to work with, as to what is expected of the children for different grades.  Obviously we also did not start Mandarin from Grade 1 so we are having to work extra hard on all aspects of Mandarin but that's OK.  I know that they will become more proficient!

I also don't let this become an all consuming list of things to do but it's good to keep this in front of me to keep the end in sight.  Our intention is to eventually do our final exams in Mandarin though we do hope that by that time, we will already be in China - as I do believe that full immersion in a language you are learning is the best way to learn a language.

I think that if I lived in an environment where other children were studying Mandarin in schools, I could use them as a bench mark to find out what they were doing in school and what type of resources they were using - but I have yet to find someone in my area, who is also studying Mandarin.  Though there does seem to be a universal trend towards the study of Mandarin - I don't think there are many South African families who are picking this language up as a second or third language because of the lack of support or even information on this language.

What curriculum guidelines do you use?  Or do just let your children learn freely?

Learning Chinese Mandarin using television or online videos

 As you know, we are a homeschooling family who decided to learn Chinese Mandarin as our second language.  It's been an interesting experience and though we have been doing this for some time, it feels like we have barely scratched the surface of this amazingly musical language.  I spend hours researching different resources and techniques to stimulate further learner or just to add variety and interest.

There are a few websites we visit to watch various cartoons in Chinese Mandarin.  I enjoy these especially because they are familiar to us and so does not feel so "foreign".  These programs could keep you busy for the whole year, because there are so many episodes to watch.  My children have also started learning Chinese characters and though the characters appear very quickly on the screen, they like to test their knowledge of what they are learning all the time.

Dora the Explorer
Bob the Builder
Adventures of Little Carp
Handy Manny
Berenstein Bears
Spongebob Squarepants

We also make use of Chinese TV which has so many channels, where both you and your children can choose programs from news, to documentaries or cartoons if you look around (you will obviously need to screen them just like you do at home.)  I have found the site quite difficult to navigate around but I often ask Google to translate the page for me, as I don't want to be heading off to any strange sites or advertisements.

Remember that Barnie or any of these characters are not able to teach you Chinese Mandarin but are rather a way to supplement the method you use, when learning the language.

If you are learning Chinese Mandarin as a second language, whether you homeschool or not - why not share what websites you have found to learn the language or that have made lessons really fun.

And if this is your first visit here why not Sign up and make sure that you get each post in your inbox or alternatively follow on the RSS feed.

Linking up with Raising Homemakers,  Living Well Wednesdays, 

Can Barnie teach you Chinese Mandarin?

Can you put your child in front of a television and find that after a month or two that he has started speaking a new language?  Dora the explorer, Thomas the Train and the Berenstein Bears can all be found in Mandarin.  Could they teach your child the intricacies of the language.  Unlikely, I do not believe that television can be used to teach a second language like Chinese Mandarin but I do think it can be beneficial in the following ways:

*  Becoming familiar with the sound of the language and real time talking
A lot of programs that teach you a second language, speak at a speed which is beneficial for learning but is not the speed with which most native Chinese people speak.  Watching television in Mandarin will give you a far more realistic awareness of the language and what Mandarin sounds like by a native speaker.
*  Practise
Writing Chinese characters, learning Pinyin and vocabulary can all be practised.  This is especially relevant when you use television programs aimed at little children as the presentation is far simpler and easier to understand.
*  Fun
Ever tried to watch the Lion King in Chinese?  It can be both entertaining and fun, especially if your children know the story in English.  We have had some really funny moments listening to Simba speaking with in Mandarin.

I also find that the children get tired of doing the same programs every day (even if you alternate them), adding a bit of telly seems to bring the language to life
*  Culture

Part of our language study includes culture.  We have done some cooking, some social studies and some online research into the Chinese culture. Language cannot exist without the understanding of the culture too.  We might not always understand the language but the understanding of the culture, will definitely help you to navigate in certain situations.


So don't expect the likes of Barnie or Thomas the Train to do the hard work for you but it certainly will make a difference in your child's language learning and they will enjoy it even more.

Review: Learning Mandarin Chinese with Memrise

I stumbled upon this site tonight and I am truly fascinated and hooked.  Memrise is website where you can learn languages for free.  My interest lies in Mandarin, as my children are learning Mandarin as a second language, while their parents learn slightly slower than they do:)

So far its been an adventure but not one that I regret.  I love the sound of this language, its complexity, the art that is so part of their Chinese characters, the sing song way it is pronounced.  Of course, it's not easy, it's definitely not for the faint hearted but I believe that this will be a rewarding endeavour for our whole family.

So back to Memrise. It has a truly impressive development team!  Which include some of the most interestingly gifted people:

* Ed is Memrise's resident memory man. He's a Grandmaster of Memory who can learn a 1000 digit number in an hour or a pack of shuffled cards in 45 seconds. He once taught a forgetful journalist, Josh Foer, to become US memory champion in a single year.
*  Greg is Memrise's resident authority on the human brain. He studied neuroscience at Oxford, Harvard and Princeton, where he spent his PhD using brain -scanners to observe memory at work.
* Spencer's residency is in Memrise's code-wizard department. While still at school, he was a grand prize winner in Google's international coding-competition

AND THAT'S JUST THE FIRST THREE OF THE TEAM!

Now let's see, a Grandmaster of Memory, a professor of memory, and a code whiz - now I am sure that they know a thing or two about learning! With a combination of Science, Fun and Community they have built an awesome website.  I know you may think I am raving about a product that doesn't seem like much on paper but you need to try it to believe it. ( I did mention that it was for free didn't I?)

I have a lot of people, who want to study Mandarin Chinese, asking me what products we use and I would definitely say that I enjoy this one.  I really think its a winning combination.

Just look at how they create "mems", aren't these associations so good? Guaranteed you won't forget these Chinese characters. 

Mandarin Character for dagger

Chinese character for surround

Mandarin character for woman

 And to add some more fun to your learning experience you have to plant seeds, water them and then harvest them and that's all linked to short and long term memory.  And if you forget (which I am inclined to do - or it could just be the inherit laziness in me) they remind you with an email telling you to get to your garden quick because your plants are wilting.  (starting to remind me of my own rather poor gardening skills).

My current status is that I have learnt 14 words out of 3009! (still early days)

In terms of age, I definitely think that it needs to be used by children who can read, as some of the words don't have image associations but word or idea associations.  But I do think that if you sat with your child, they could enjoy the benefits of the images and descriptions. 

This is definitely something I will be spending more time on, as Mandarin Chinese is a big language with a large vocabulary to be learnt.  Apparently (by those in the know), it takes about 3000 characters to be able to read a Chinese newspaper, so maybe this will help!

For those of you that are not interest in Mandarin, why not try another language?  The list is long and if you can't find it, you can suggest it.  How cool is that?
Languages that are currently available on Memrise are:
French, Spanish, German, Italian, English, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian,Swedish, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Catalan, Danish, Greek, Estonian, Persian, Finnish, Irish, , Hebrew, Hindi, Croatian (page 1 of 6 pages of languages)
You are spoilt for choice!

Happy learning!

Please Note:  I have not been asked to write about this program.  They don't know me, they don't know my children - they don't even know my name.- I get nothing from doing this.  Just sharing a bit about what works for us as a family as we journey through this maze of second language learning in Chinese Mandarin.

Linking up with: Raising Homemakers,  Titus 2sday Link Up,  Growing Home:  Teach me Tuesdays,  Living Well Wednesdays,  Domestically Divine Tuesday

Learning Chinese Mandarin as a Second or Third Language

With our desire to have our children learn another language(other than English and Afrikaans), we opted for Mandarin.  Not a natural choice, as the only Chinese in our areas are the ones that own a few retails stores or the buses that bring in scores of tourists to our beach where they subsequently take numerous photos of us standing next to them.  In fact many would say - what is the relevance?  Well the answer would be....none - unless you are part of this family.  Sean and I would love to live in China and the east and so we thought, how better to prepare our children than to get them studying the language?  And we really noticed how difficult it was on our recent visit without this tool.  Unlike a lot of countries where English is a second language, many Chinese don't even understand the most basic English.  Not because they don't know English on paper but how we pronounce a word is not the way we pronounce a word.  You can understand this if you think of the word minute(60 seconds) and minute(tiny).

We approached learning Mandarin in a number of different ways:

1.  Online

There are so many online resources out there, you could just get lost in that Mandarin jungle.  However it is very possible to learn if you are motivated, without paying a cent.  The only down side is that its not really user friendly for children which means you need to have a very hands on approach.  And of course I am naturally a little suspicious of any sites with too much "action" on it, my overcautious brain worries about viruses.  And most of these sites are like that.  They also seem to be a little random in terms of what you learn.


2.  Tutor 

We tried a tutor in the beginning, a very sweet local Chinese man who came once a week and attempted to teach all of us at the same time -  but we felt almost like we needed to constantly be memorising words and within a week we had forgotten all of them.  Especially when we were lazy and didn't even bother. (that would pretty much be most of the time).  The children lost interest after 10 minutes and were frustrated that they had to do this on a Saturday. 


3. Rosetta Stone
So after we had researched a number of options, we considered all the online options - and there are a lot, but in the end we settled on Rosetta Stone.  

We love the way this system works.    What I have found with this computer program is that most of the lessons are 5 to 10 minutes long.  You learn words through pictures and drawing your own conclusions about what you are looking at.  (Which is the way we learn when we are children - we don't normally translate when teaching our children. )  

The one I bought is a the Homeschooling Edition which allows you to monitor how long each child spends on a lesson, what result they got and how far they have progressed.  In fact you  can print off a report for each child.  Which of course is ideal for those of you that need to keep records.  It allows up to 5 registered users at the same time, so both Sean and I are obviously learning too, but at a much slower pace:) 

We have included this as part of our school curriculum and the children enjoy it.  They love progressing through the system.  You can even tailor make your program based on where each child is at in terms of age, reading skills.  So for a child who cannot read you could start them just on the speech and pronunciation.  Its a year long program but you can reduce that to less if you want something more brief.  

As a South African this does not come cheap because though the program for Level 1 costs $159(though if you order a number of levels, there are specials on bulk buying), there is also postage which is $50 (though it does mean the program arrives 3 days later - literally on your doorstep) There is also an import tax which needs to be paid which is about R200.  But but dare I say that I still think its worth every cent!  For those of you based in the States, its definitely a lot less as there are no shipping fees and then they also allow you to pay with your credit card over 6 months - which is a real bonus.


I have heard that there are other programs out there, and I am sure that there are those that are better or worse.  But this is what our family is using and we are thrilled with the results.  


They do have an online demonstrations so you can get a sense of the way they present the material.  Of course if you are not interested in Mandarin they do offer a large variety of languages and once you get to the higher levels there are interactive live sessions.

Please note that this is not a recommendation because we get a cent from Rosetta Stone or that they even know who I am - but my kids love them, and so do I - So how's that for a bit of free advertising?

Mother Matters

We had our first very successful webinar last week, with Bronwyn Ansell as our guest speaker on the topic of Homeschooling with Cambridge.  Its was an interesting session with lots of questions.  It was an hour long session but there was so much to ask, it could easily have continued for another hour.

A few of you sms'ed and emailed to say that you were struggling to connect to the webinar.  If you need assistance because you are not sure how to do all the "techno stuff" - don't feel embarrassed.  My wonderful husband is on technical support and he's great.  He's very patient and is happy to chat you through the process.  We will be online at the meeting 30 minutes before we start, to ensure that any of you need help you can call us, or skype us.

The contact details for Mother Matters are:
Landline:  +27 21 788 2809
Cell:  082 5777 340
Skype:  mother.mel

So this week we are looking forward to our second session and to you joining us for this event.

Wednesday 28 September 2011 8.30pm-9.30pm

 Topic:  Homeschooling: Large Families

Panelist:  Linnie Lues (http://backtoancientways.blogspot.com)

"I would like to share with you my experiences on my journey to become:  A submissive wife with a gentle and quiet spirit; An encouraging, loving mother who wants her children to become everything God intends them to be; A home schooling mother of eight, who uses the tool of education to grow godly character; develop life skills; discover their gifting, talents and godly calling; An excellent cook of healthy, nutritional and tasty meals to enable my family to live a long and productive life and fulfill their Godly calling."

Topics on the Agenda will include:

*  How to teach across the big age gap (multiple levels)
*  What to do with toddlers when their siblings are learning
*  Single salary and Budgeting
  *  Practical home management tips including:  snack times, meal prep, socialisation (so many children to take to so many sporting or music activities)
*  Chores and training up children to be part of the household

To register:  Click here

(This webinar is free)

This webinar is sponsored by Slingshot Joomla! CMS Specialist

We would love to have you join us at Mother Matters! See you all there!

To view our webinar schedule for the upcoming month click here