Your Teaching Goal for Mandarin Chinese: Children Under 8 Years of Age

Your goal for teaching young children Chinese should be the development of native speaker level pronunciation. This comes from spending time in a Chinese language environment.

Since children have the ability to learn languages easily and quickly (unlike the rest of us, who really have to hit the books), creating even a temporary language immersion environment can be amazingly helpful.

If you do not have the opportunity to spend at least a few months in China, using such tools as children's television programs, DVDs, cartoons, and music CDs, allow your child to hear the language on a regular basis.

Here are some basic guidelines for children under eight:

1. Always remember that your goal is to help your child fall in love with learning Chinese. He or she has the opportunity to develop almost native speaker level pronunciation at this age. This is the most important goal! Vocabulary and everything else can be studied, but native speaker level pronunciation can only be acquired at this age!
2. Select five to ten hours worth of age-appropriate material. Buying vocabulary drills or structured lessons on tape do not count!
3. Create a stress-free and relaxed environment for your child and play the DVDs or CDs.
4. Leave your child alone (unless you speak Mandarin) to soak in the language. It's hard to listen to a new language when Mom or Dad is chatting away in English (or whatever your native language might be).
   
5. The length of the time spent with the material is determined by your child. If you are tempted to force your child to watch the material you have selected, you have purchased the wrong material!
6. Let your child's interest level guide you. Does he or she enjoy the current material? If so, get more. Basically, go with the flow!
7. Do not push the introduction of pinyin until your child reads English well. See our early blog posts for a discussion of pinyin.
   
8. Focus on listening and speaking skills.
   
9. Use flashcards with pictures and characters to introduce reading when your child becomes interested. Children learn quickly which characters go with which sounds. You can let them use the pinyin, if they find it interesting, but let them work with the cards on their own and see what happens. Many children focus on the link between the spoken Chinese word and the written Chinese character. This is perfect. Once your child is reading English well, he or she can quickly pick up pinyin in an afternoon!
   

Teaching tips: Credit to our Beijing-based language instructor and former middle school teacher Zhang. Translated from the original Mandarin by Montessori House staff (the original Mandarin was more elegantly put!)