Chinese for Children: Building Vocabulary

Children do best when they start off with simple words that can quickly and easily be combined to make lots of phrases. Earlier, we discussed numbers, which are perfect for beginning students because the Chinese numbering system is very logical (if you missed that post, it's here at the bottom of the page).

To review, the numbers from 1 to 10:

1 = yi

2 = er

3 = san

4 = si

5 = wu

6 = liu

7 = qi

8 = ba

9 = jiu

10 = shi


And, these are new:

11 = shi yi

12 = shi er

13 = shi san

14 = shi si

15 = shi wu

16 = shi liu

17 = shi qi

18 = shi ba

19 = shi jiu

20 = er shi


Check out our Montessori Mandarin bilingual flash cards!