Bilingual Q&A 4: Shortcuts for young children to learn Chinese
Chinese learning represents both oral and written aspects
Speaking
Regardless of the language, as long as the child has the opportunity to listen to this language, the child will "naturally" learn to listen. After accumulating for a period of time, he will naturally speak it, although each child opens his mouth to speak sooner or later. As long as the child has no physical defects, every child has the talent to learn spoken language.
Text aspect
Besides learning spoken language, the most important thing is reading, reading, reading, reading. "Don't be in a hurry to write." This writing includes both writing and creation.
-》First, read and write must be separated. (I’m going to talk about writing first, and I’ll talk about creation later)
Don't slow down reading because of writing. Children's small muscles are underdeveloped, so writing early is half the effort, but literacy and reading can start very early.
Fully realize that "reading" (recognizing characters) is more important than writing, especially with modern technology, there are phonetic input methods, pinyin or phonetic input methods to replace writing, but you must be able to recognize characters in order to choose the correct characters.
-》Secondly, it requires a lot of reading, and by the way, a lot of literacy
For bilingual families, everyone knows that it is much easier for children to understand English books than Chinese books. Even though there is only one line of text on each page of a simple Chinese picture book, if a child does not know hundreds or thousands of Chinese characters, he will not be able to read it. Because there are too many new characters, he can only read them with adults and cannot read them independently. Look at the pictures in the book.
-》Understand the possible situations that may arise when you slowly learn to read words.
Of course, there is no problem in learning to read slowly, especially for monolingual children. If they learn slowly, they will eventually learn to read.
However, if you learn English and Chinese at the same time, and if you slowly develop and accumulate Chinese reading ability and literacy, as your children get older, they will only be able to read some reading materials that are below their cognitive level and are relatively childish. In contrast, English books I can already read very complex stories. This is because English is basically a fluent spoken language, and the transition to reading text is much easier and faster than Chinese. This is because Chinese does take more time to transition from speaking to reading.
Faced with such a situation, children gradually tend to "abandon the middle and choose the best", and they will naturally choose easy-to-read storybooks to satisfy their desire to read, right?
-》 Therefore, we should strive for children to read Chinese books as early as possible and learn a lot of characters at an early age.
We publish the Lele series of books to achieve this goal. We hope that in addition to attracting children to learn literacy as early as possible through "reading" methods, they can also conduct many interesting "non-writing" literacy activities to consolidate the words they know. These words I will discuss the activity method separately.
Writing writing
For children who are bilingual in Chinese and English, I agree that after the children can read simple storybooks in English, they can be taught Chinese Pinyin. The pronunciation of Chinese Pinyin is very similar to that of English letters (only a few pronunciations are particularly different). With the right method, they will "not "You can learn it no matter how hard you work. Don't emphasize the Pinyin system to teach children Chinese Pinyin. By relying on them to learn English pronunciation, they can make slight adjustments and use the computer Pinyin input method to learn with half the effort."
With the Chinese Pinyin input tool, children can write Chinese letters to family and friends, and even/They will feel very proud after typing their own creative works, because they can communicate with others in Chinese, and the words have a deeper meaning, opening up another door for them to communicate with others!
Once children have read enough, writing will come naturally without forcing them. Not only will the written expression be smooth, but also because of extensive reading, the creative content will also have meaning.
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