Online Chinese Class Will be Kids’ Friends

With the rise of overseas Chinese fever, more and more parents send their children to online Chinese class schools to study. However, when it comes to how to help their children learn Chinese, many parents often have some problems. 

Discussing these problems and proposing solutions will play a very good role in the communication between teachers and parents.

Common problems:

1.Sending children to school too early. Many parents are very enthusiastic about letting their children learn Chinese, and they can't wait for their children to come to Chinese schools when they are 4 years old. 

But I didn't expect that from a psychological point of view, such a young child could not adapt to the continuous 3-hour Chinese class study. They can't concentrate in class and can interfere with older students' learning. 

Moreover, since young children's eyes and hand bones are not mature enough, writing in small grids too early can easily cause myopia and wrist pain, which greatly affects their original enthusiasm for learning, and even fears going to school.

According to our teaching experience, I think it is more appropriate for children to go to online Chinese class when they are 6 years old. At that time, the children had already started to go to elementary schools in Germany, became familiar with school life, and their physical conditions had also adapted to the requirements of learning.

So, how should 6-year-old children learn Chinese? Our suggestion is: qualified parents should speak more Chinese with their children, read nursery rhymes to them, and teach their children to read with flashcards. If the child has the requirement to learn to write, it is best to let the child learn to write on the blackboard, sand table or large sheets of paper. 

Do not write small print on the grid book. In this way, children can always maintain their interest in Chinese. Prepare yourself for studying in a Chinese school in the future.

Parents who are busy with work or who speak dialects do not have the qualifications themselves, so speaking standard Chinese should be one of the conditions when choosing a nanny for their children. Now there are many small international students from Northeast China studying in Germany, and many of them are willing to help others with their children. 

If they have a few hours a day or a week to play with their children and speak Chinese with them, it will be of great benefit to their children's future Chinese learning.

2. Be eager for success. Many parents have great hopes when their children are sent to Chinese schools. It is best for the child to become fat in one bite, and learn a lot every time. In the freshman class, you can often see this situation:

As soon as the teacher announced that get out of class was over, parents rushed into the classroom to check how many new words their children had learned. Then ask the child to write to them, regardless of this should be the child's rest time. Sometimes children do not write well, and they have to be criticized, which makes the children teary, and they don't want to go to the next class.

This kind of practice is really undesirable. It must be known that interest is the greatest motivation for learning. Too much pressure will dampen children's enthusiasm for learning. 

What's more, the teacher has his own teaching plan, not how many new words are taught in every class, sometimes it is review, such as flash card recognition, and sometimes it is test, such as recitation of nursery rhymes. 

Don't think that if you don't teach new characters, you haven't learned something. Three hours of continuous online Chinese class are already stressful enough for children (parents, please just imagine how you felt when you first learned German), otherwise ordinary primary and secondary schools would not need to take pains to stagger the various classes in order to arrange the schedule. 

Therefore, parents are asked to give their children enough rest time between classes, and do not put pressure on them at this time.

Tutoring children to learn Chinese is a long-term job that requires patience and perseverance. The most taboo is to be eager for success first, and then let go of it later.

It is recommended that parents spend a little time every day (15 minutes is enough) to help their children learn Chinese, such as listening to their children reading aloud, reciting, or dictating new words to their children. Instead of focusing on raids on weekends.

Should I learn Chinese Pinyin first or Chinese characters first?

Some parents send their children to Chinese schools early in order to be able to learn Chinese Pinyin before their children go to German schools, so that it will be easier to learn German later on. So they always ask teachers to teach Chinese Pinyin first, and then teach Chinese Pinyin more. I think that as long as children master the Chinese pinyin, they can learn Chinese by themselves in the future.

This is really a big misunderstanding. Chinese characters are not phonetic characters, but a combination of shape, sound, and meaning, which is based on the shape of the characters and supplemented by the sound of the characters. Learning Chinese characters overseas should not be enlightened through pinyin, which is determined by the characteristics of Chinese characters themselves.

Children around the age of 6 have a strong overall memorization ability, that is to say, their knowledge of Chinese characters or pinyin is engraved into their minds one by one with a video camera. 

This is the best time to learn Chinese characters. If after entering a Chinese school, let the children spend half a year to a year learning pinyin, they will seldom come into contact with Chinese characters. 

Then when he received pinyin teaching in a German school, he was completely used to recognizing and reading Chinese characters in the way of pinyin, and it was difficult for him to accept the complicated shapes of Chinese characters. So that I can no longer do without the crutch of pinyin. This is really a great waste for overseas Chinese children who lack a Chinese environment.

In the teaching practice, we have seen too many Chinese children or foreign students who can read the texts marked with pinyin catchy, but they don't know the meaning at all. Once you leave Pinyin, you will not be able to recognize even the Chinese characters you just taught on the blackboard. 

This is because their sensitivity has not been developed at the optimal age, so that they do not recognize online Chinese class as soon as they "move".