How to Learn Chinese for Kids, Come in!

How to learn Chinese for Kids? Referring to this, many parents are confused……

Many people think that the purpose of becoming a Chinese language teacher in Singapore is to teach "Chinese as a foreign language". 

So what are the so-called Chinese teachers in Singapore like?

In Singapore, children receive bilingual education from an early age, from early family education to high school, bilingual education has been accompanied. 

In Singapore, English is the compulsory first language course for children. But every child learns a second language, their mother tongue, which is determined by their ethnicity. 

For example, Indian children need to learn Tamil, Malay children need to learn Bahasa Malaysia, and Chinese children naturally need to learn Chinese (Chinese).

Learning Chinese is a worthwhile pursuit. Chinese is the key to potentially communicating with the other 100 million inhabitants of the planet - a truly remarkable skill. This post is an early guide for those embarking on this journey.

So how to learn Chinese for kids?

1. Learning Chinese is a worthwhile pursuit

Learning a new language takes effort, patience, and a willingness to learn from mistakes. Believe it or not, it's also a fun and fulfilling pursuit! 

While many people think Chinese or Zhōngwén (Chinese) is a difficult language to master, it is definitely not that hard to start learning and people tend to believe it!

In fact, after just a few months of diligent study, many students have been able to order food, ask directions, travel, talk about their interests, and even have basic conversations with other learners and native speakers.

The rewards don't stop there! "Standard Mandarin" or "pǔtōnghuà" (Mandarin) literally means "universal language".

The name alludes to the fact that Mandarin, a dialect of mainland China, is spoken by more than 90 billion people worldwide, making it the most spoken language in the world!

This is just another reason why learning Mandarin is so rewarding. Knowing how to speak this versatile and engaging language, even if it's just the basics, will open doors for you to travel to China and explore Chinese culture.

Additionally, China has become an international economic and business superstar, so being able to communicate in Mandarin will be a valuable asset and tool to use in your career.

2. Mandarin is a tonal language

Before you start learning Chinese, remember that, like pitches in music, different Chinese characters have different pitches. This is what we mean when we say Chinese is "tone".

Standard Mandarin has four tones (five if you consider neutral tones) that give multiple meanings to words made from the same mix of consonants and vowels.

Since tone is an important aspect of a word's meaning, knowing the correct tone is an important part of learning Chinese. 

This, in particular, can make Chinese a difficult language to learn, but with enough practice, and by improving your Chinese listening skills, you will be able to distinguish and use the correct tone when speaking! 

Improving your knowledge of intonation will help you avoid making common tone mistakes.

3. Chinese reading and writing are very attractive and very different from English

Unlike English, which uses the Latin alphabet, Chinese uses what are called 'hanzi' (Chinese characters). 

The characters are fascinating, each with their unique background, structure, and construction method (what we call strokes).

As a new learner of Chinese, reading and writing Chinese characters can be unfamiliar and will take some time and patience to learn, especially since there are over 50,000 Chinese characters (although even educated Chinese usually only know about 5,000 of them)!

Fortunately, there are many excellent resources for reading and writing Chinese (section 7 below this article mentions just a few of them).

If you make time every day to study and practice, you will find yourself understood and understood in no time!

4. Pinyin, your Rosetta Stone to Chinese

Pinyin (pinyin) is the official Romanization system used to teach standard Mandarin in mainland China. It is a learning tool that includes four diacritics to indicate tones.

Although Pinyin is written in the English alphabet, and many of its letters are pronounced the same way as in English, some are pronounced differently, which can be confusing for beginners. Check out the CLI phonetic map and cheat sheet to learn more!

5. Chinese grammar is easier than you think

No matter what language you study, learning grammatical structures can be tricky. However, the fact is that the basic Chinese grammatical structure is very similar to that of English in many ways.

In fact, both languages use a subject-verb or subject-verb-object pattern.

For example, if you want to say "I drink water", you would say "I drink water" (wǒ hē shuǐ). 我 wǒ = 'I', drink hē = 'drink', and water shuǐ = 'water'. 

For those who decide to learn Chinese, it is helpful to understand this basic similarity in grammatical structure, as it can make the learning process more straightforward.

So how do you know how to learn Chinese for Kids?