Teaching our daughter Chinese and how to recognise characters from an early age

[prephil]

My husband and I are both living in Ireland with our daughter. I’m Chinese and he’s Irish. We visited some friends yesterday and they had some books by Feng De Quan on how to teach children Chinese. They had labelled certain items with Chinese characters like the fridge, window, light switch etc. All this was part of the advice given in Feng De Quan’s book.

Currently I speak Chinese with my daughter. She’s 14 months old. My husband speaks English with her. He’s learning Chinese at the moment. Can anyone recommend where we can get Feng De Quan’s books? Mt sister is coming over shortly to help out with our next baby whose due soon so she can bring them over with her. Also, can anyone recommend any other good books for teaching our children Chinese?

Finally, any good websites/books for my husband to learn Chinese characters? He’s using Chinese pinyin at the moment.

[xiaotao]

I am a mother of two. From my experience, looking at picture books (not the story books) and speaking to your child in Chinese is all you need to do. Some if not a majority of very young children are not interested in stories. My oldest child easily learned all the ABC and Zhuyin fuhao at age 3. She didn't start reading 3-4 letter English words until 5 and the same goes to stringing together zhuyin fuhao. They were exposed to Chinese characters to recognize starting at age 3 but generally it was in a very relaxed manner. My kids didn't start writing characters until first grade.

[creamyhorror]

This is probably a useful page to read:

How To Raise A Bilingual Child (specifically targeted at Chinese/English)

[msittig]

creamyhorror, that's a super-infomative link! An excellent example of raising what I call *bi-literate* children.

[David Rickard]

creamyhorror, I loved that link. In actualality I've seen something like that when I was a child and I cannot wait to teach that to my children!

[knickherboots]

We have faced this issue with our son. I'm a native English speaker, but I also speak Chinese, and at one point only spoke Chinese with my wife, who is a native Chinese speaker. (Now we switch back and forth.) On the advice of an outstanding Japanese teacher who raised bilingual children, we followed one principle that is easy in theory, but sometimes difficult in practice: Always use your native language when speaking with your child. This was sometimes difficult when he was younger. When we lived in China and he was a toddler, he did not want to use English with me, and then he started to resist Chinese after he started to attend primary school in the U.S. Now, as a sixth grader back in China and attending a private Chinese school, he is getting very close to a kind of bilingual equilibrium. Our three-way conversations are admittedly a bit odd because my wife and I switch back and forth between English and Chinese with each other while our son has been "hardwired" to use only English with me and Chinese with her. But we've been happy with the result. Unfortunately, I can't provide advice on developing reading skills, or what the downside to this approach is if one parent doesn't speak the other parent's native tongue, as is your case. But I think that having solid oral Chinese skills helped tremendously when we moved back to Beijing and enrolled our son in a Chinese curriculum, even though he only recognized a few hundred characters. (I wasn't able to open the link because I'm at a computer in Beijing that does not allow access to blogspot and am sorry if this duplicates any of the advice there.) Good luck!

[Meng Lelan]

Also, can anyone recommend any other good books for teaching our children Chinese?

Came across this today while browsing ChinaSprout. "Primary Mandarin Chinese Reader" series - each level has six stories. Flash cards accompany each level. For ages 3-8. Being a teacher myself, I liked how repetition is used to teach vocabulary and sentence structure. There's a website for this series.

http://primarymandarin.com/eng/home/

I'm ordering it to use with the middle school class I teach and hopefully come back here with some review.

[rezaf]

Is it possible to raise a trilingual child?

[Meng Lelan]

rezaf, I think it is possible. When I was in high school, a classmate of mine was born in the US, then lived a while in Italy with his American father and his German mother. When he came back to the US to my high school, I could hear him conversing in Italian, German, and English with some European exchange students there. By the way he was in my French class too.

[rezaf]

Actually four languages if my wife and I decide to have a baby!:blink:

Mandarin, Shanghainese from my wife

Persian from me and

English from somewhere else.

That will be a really confusing first 6 years of life for the poor child!

[Meng Lelan]

Oh, that would be exciting!

I am sure you and your wife will do fine in term of teaching languages to the baby who will be the envy of the Polyglots here in the Chinese Forums.

By the way - Persian - would that be Farsi? Just wondering.

[HedgePig]

A friend of mine, whose field is language acquisition, told me that most children can cope with up to 4 different languages and not get confused. So I wouldn't have too much hesitation about trying to raise a trilingual child. But don't forget there is also a lot of variation amongst children and some are simply better at picking up language skills than others. (Er....like adults.)

[rezaf]

By the way - Persian - would that be Farsi?

Yes

[Misty]

I just recently started teaching my 17 month old Chinese characters. I am going very slowly, mostly due to laziness on my part. Right now, he knows the characters for fire, mom, dad, grandpa (both sides of family), grandma, big, star, and door. I think that is all he knows. He doesn't talk yet, so it makes things a little difficult. What I did was, I made little cardboard squares and wrote a character on each, then I point to the corresponding person or object. I probably will end up putting pictures on the back of the cards, but right now I am a bit lazy. I stole the idea from a relative whose daughter when she was my son's age could recognize about 80 characters. So, yes, early character recognition at this age is very possible.

[knickherboots]

rezaf: If you try to raise a multilingual child one day, you might find your wife trying to use both Mandarin and Shanghainese counterproductive. Based on my experience with my own experience as a bilingual child, my bilingual child and other children, I think children want to focus on using one language with an individual. I think that, in certain situations, a parent can teach a second language, but it should probably be a formal arrangement. Otherwise, the child will develop a creole that mixes the different languages and end up messing up both. Maybe there's an exception to this caveat--an adult could probably switch back and forth if you are living some place where both languages are common. In your case, that would be Shanghai, where there are enough people in the environment speaking both Mandarin and Shanghainese that a child would be able to develop both pretty well, even with a parent somewhat haphazardly switching between topolects.

Misty: Though I don't understand your child's general linguistic environment, your post sounds strange to me. If your objective is to raise a bilingual child, focusing on character recognition with flashcards at 17 months doesn't sound like the best approach. Also, spoken language comes before written. At least wait until your son can speak. You "stole the idea" from a relative? That's a strange way to put it. Are you in a competitive relatonship with that person?

[Misty]

Knickherboots: My post was in response to the original poster's post about character recognition. Aside from that, I see nothing wrong in starting character recognition at an early age. Chinese characters are meant to be memorized. That really is the main way to learn them. Also, it serves as a memory exercise. The characters have actually coaxed him into talking a little more. He only says "ba, ma, a, da, and wa" So when I say he doesn't talk, I really meant he talks very very little. For ex. Upon seeing the character for 'big' my son will go "da" and open his arms to mimic the character. When reading Chinese story books, he will read some of the characters when I point to them. When hearing grandma's voice over the phone, he runs to grab the grandma card on his own accord and then pairs it up with the correct grandpa card. Now, if you are going to give me the argument that it will affect his talking, then I suggest you read into the whole sign language debate. Most importantly, my son enjoys learning them. He has fun. The phrase "I stole the idea" means I took the idea from someone. I am sure you understood that. It is a pretty general saying in the US. No negativity or competitiveness was implied.

[Meng Lelan]

Now, if you are going to give me the argument that it will affect his talking, then I suggest you read into the whole sign language debate

Chinese characters are not considered sign language.

[Misty]

Of course, Chinese characters are not considered sign language. However, the idea that learning characters will affect the child's speaking ability correlates to that debate. Many kids learn both sign language and speaking simultaneously without any negative impact. Thus, I am relating learning Chinese characters to that. A toddler can learn both the language and the characters without having their speech hindered. I have seen it done. I am guessing that is the concern Knickerherboots had with the character recognition situation. I am not saying this approach is for everyone, but it is awesome seeing a kid get excited with reading and wanting to read along.

[Meng Lelan]

I think you could be referring to signs in isolation, not true sign language which has its own grammar and structure.

Hearing children are very dominant in communicating orally and aurally so isolated and occasional signs isn't going to impact their speaking anymore than isolated and occasional Chinese characters would impact on their speaking.

Knickherboots is right though about speaking and listening coming before reading and writing. You have to internalize the language orally and aurally before you can read and write. That's why my deaf students are so delayed in reading and writing, because they never knew their own native language, ever.

[knickherboots]

Misty: Maybe my statement "At least wait until your child can speak" came across as bossy. I was responding to visions in my head of an anxious parent drilling a recalcitrant 17-month-old with Chinese flashcards. But this is not be the case, because your son is having fun learning the characters. My point, though, is unrelated to the argument that introducing the written word "too early" will hinder oral development. I don't subscribe to that argument, if anyone holds it. (I can only imagine cases where some sort of outrageous pressure to learn how to read can lead to delayed or impaired oral skills. I propped our son up on the sofa and did "book work" with him before his spindly neck could support the unusually heavy head with which we homo sapiens are endowed.)

I just think that effective teaching methods should, at least at that age, be pretty child-centered, which yours seem to be. At the risk of being seen as a conceited parent, I can talk about our son's experience. His interest in and ability to read English-language books changed most dramatically in first grade, when he started to devour them voraciously. I'm not exactly sure why it happened then, but I think it was related to neurological changes. Yes, it probably helped that he always saw his parents with their noses in books and was otherwise encouraged to read and had access to a lot of material. Chinese is different in some ways, but I doubt that learning to recognize characters at an early age is indicative of writing ability and reading skills at a later stage. He returned to China when he was almost ten with very weak reading skills, but pretty strong oral skills. (I think he made it to the last book in level one of Biaozhun Zhongwen, Renmin Jiaoyu Chubanshe). Now, after attending a Chinese school for two-and-a-half years, his reading, writing, and character recognition skills are at grade level, and his exams scores are in the top quarter of the class.