Review: Sing Chinese with Me,Sinolingua

[John Zhouran]

This is a review of the Sing Chinese with Me book and CD published by Sinolingua.

 

Sing Chinese with Me is designed to help children learn Chinese at a beginner’s level. The book incorporates cartoons and songs to teach young learners to speak, read and write basic Chinese instead of simply using more traditional teaching methods. The book aims to:

• Teach Chinese pronunciation such as vowels, consonants and tones through singing. Learners will be able to not only practice Chinese pronunciation, but also learn Chinese phonetic symbols in an engaging and fun manner.

• Educate children in basic Chinese vocabulary words, grammatical structures and idioms through songs. Students will learn by singing verbalised lyrics, which will also improve their spoken Chinese.

• Employ tongue-twisters, children’s rhymes and jokes. These excellent studying materials make learning Chinese more fun.

 

The book combines video and audio materials and includes an MP4 in addition to the textbook. The textbook contains the English translation throughout the book, which helps reduce language difficulties. The MP4 contains flash animation, music and songs.

 

I found the Sing Chinese with me book and text to be of excellent quality which included everything necessary for the beginner and for elementary learners who are interested in learning with the aid of songs and music.  The MP4 contains 22 childrens songs with video that are very catchy sung by young children with beautiful voices and backed by an orchestra, with my favourite being 我有一个小毛驴.

 

I listened to the songs for 3 weeks and although busy due to a move to China in August, will continue to listen to and enjoy the great music and songs. I found the cartoons that accompany the songs to be a little dated and unappealing but maybe that just helped me to focus more on the lyrics and the music.

[lechuan]

Thanks for the review. Just curious, do they try to teach tones through singing? Might be kind of cool if they matched the melody to match the contours of the tones.

[Lu]

Learners will be able to (...) learn Chinese phonetic symbols

Which phonetic symbols do you mean? Hanyu Pinyin, Zhuyin Fuhao, something else?

I too am curious how the book teaches tones through singing.

[John Zhouran]

The book contains 22 songs. The first few songs teach vowels, consonants and tones so I expect the correct usage of tones is very important. However in later songs the tones probably follow the melody more. Personally I agree with Nathan Mao, that in modern Chinese music it seems that the usage of correct tones is less important.

 

The book aims to teach Chinese phonetic symbols in an engaging and fun manner.  Beginners can follow along with the Pinyin on the cartoon and also in the book.   (The aims as stated in the review are directly transcribed from the book)

 

Now can I start packing for my first ESL job in China! Very excited.