Online Chinese Class is a Necessary Choice!

Online Chinese class is a necessary choice?

For Chinese living abroad, in addition to working hard to adapt to the local life and culture, the most worrying thing is how to maintain or improve their children's Chinese proficiency. I often hear complaints from parents in various environments, how do I have to threaten and lure my child to go to a Chinese school? 

The child speaks Chinese with a strange accent, so he refuses to speak Chinese. To tear the parent-child relationship. The onlookers nodded frequently as they listened, and it seemed that they often encountered obstacles in the matter of children learning Chinese. 

Many parents think that as long as they are literate and read a lot, they will be able to learn Chinese well. However, one point has been overlooked, which is precisely the most important thing in Chinese primary school Chinese education - Hanyu Pinyin.

Why learn Chinese Pinyin?

Because Hanyu Pinyin is the criterion of standard pronunciation, it is the most effective and convenient tool for phonetic notation of Chinese characters. With the foundation of Chinese Pinyin, we can look up unfamiliar characters in the dictionary, and we can freely input Chinese characters on the computer. 

Even if you already know one or two thousand online Chinese class, if you don’t know Chinese Pinyin, it’s difficult to increase your literacy, and it’s also difficult to correct your pronunciation, and you can’t communicate quickly through voice typing. How can you continue to improve your Chinese learning?

Chinese Pinyin uses 26 letters that are commonly used internationally, and uses four tonal symbols to represent the four tones of Yinping, Yangping, Shangsheng, and Qusheng. 

Because of the foundation of Chinese Pinyin, China's official language is also the United Nations. One of the standard working languages, "Mandarin" also has corresponding standards and national unified examination requirements. 

For children who grow up in an English environment, it is not difficult to recognize or spell most of the pinyin letters. What is difficult is how to correctly pronounce a small part of pinyin and the four tones, and speak standard Mandarin.

Some parents may think, my child lives overseas, so it is good to be able to speak, and it is not a big problem if the pronunciation is not standard, right? Yes, and it is a big obstacle. 

It will not only prevent children from further learning Chinese characters by themselves, and further improve their understanding and application of Chinese, but also may resist using Chinese because of the weird pronunciation and intonation that affects their self-confidence. 

Some time ago, the video clip of the two daughters of the American financial giant Rogers showing Chinese was popular on WeChat, which made many Chinese people exclaim that they are foreigners, which shows how enviable standard spoken English is. 

Today, the English proficiency of children in many parts of China is already very high, and the fluent and idiomatic English is no different from that of children who grew up in the United States. 

The regional differences in the world have become smaller and smaller, and the natural advantages of some regions are gradually disappearing. Overseas children may also develop in China in the future. 

In many industries that need to deal with people, such as announcers, hosts, teachers, tour guides and Spokespersons of government departments, etc., all require certificates of Putonghua examinations. 

Mastering one more online Chinese class can give you one more opportunity, no, maybe dozens or hundreds of opportunities. Now that we are determined to train the next generation to learn Chinese, why not lay a solid foundation?

Since pinyin is so important, how can we teach children well?

We all know that there is a sensitive period for language learning, which is about 3 to 12 years old. The closer to 12 years old, the more sensitive to new languages will gradually decrease. 

Grasp the sensitive period of learning and lay a solid foundation for Chinese Pinyin between the ages of 5 and 8 to achieve the best learning efficiency and effect. Currently, several popular methods of learning pinyin overseas include:

Parents teach by themselves: Pinyin teaching has a special outline and teaching skills, and it is not easy for parents to teach Pinyin completely; what's more, due to China's large population and complicated dialects, some parents have poor pinyin foundation and obvious accents when they were young. 

For example, many people in the southwestern region can't pronounce n and l well. When they say "milk", they will pronounce "流lǎi". The lǎi cannot be found in the dictionary, and there is no corresponding word when inputting it into the computer. 

Another example is the phenomenon of zhu, chu, and shu being pronounced ju, qu, and xu in Changzhutan, Hubei, Hunan, and near Wuhan, such as ju, qu, and xu for "live", while people in Guizhou, Sichuan, do not have the difference between flat tongue and warped tongue. 

"Four" and "Ten" have exactly the same pronunciation except for the difference in pitch. They understand what they are saying, but the listeners are stunned. 

In this regard, parents in some areas in the north have relatively more advantages, and usually try to practice and talk with their children as much as possible. If your pronunciation is not standard enough, it is best to seek help from professionals or institutions.

Chinese Schoology: The teaching goals of each school are different, so the level of teachers hired varies. Some teachers have never taken the Putonghua Proficiency Test (PSC: PUTONGHUA SHUIPING CESHI), and do not have the qualifications to teach standard modern Chinese. 

Some Chinese school teachers, perhaps mothers who accompany their children to school, have great enthusiasm, but they have not received professional teaching training, and their teaching methods may not be correct. 

There are also some schools that focus on literacy and do not set up pinyin classes, or adopt a teaching plan that starts with literacy and then learns pinyin in the upper grades, just missing the best stage for children to learn standard pronunciation.

Among the major textbooks popular in North America, the consideration of pinyin is also different, and not every set of textbooks attaches great importance to the teaching of pinyin.

Simply teaching Pinyin is a boring process that tests the teacher's teaching level. It is necessary to design many interesting games and scenes to help students practice a lot and repeatedly. 

How can children be interested in simply pointing to pictures or letters? It is difficult to cater for the specific needs of each child in a one-to-many Chinese school class. Correcting the wrong pronunciation requires the cooperation of parents. 

It is not realistic to throw the child to the APP on the online Chinese class. Some claim that the child can communicate with the microphone. The software that judges the correct pronunciation by speaking has many problems. Children who pronounce correctly always fail to pass, and after failing several times, they lose interest in learning.