Best Websites and Activities For Teaching Chinese to Kids

[Kathy]

Hi Everybody,

Please make your suggestions for the best websites and activities for teaching KIDS online and post them both to this thread on Chinese-forums, and to the Best Websites for Teaching Chinese at:

www.eslwebcamforkids.com/forum/

Please remember - this is for KIDS

There are literally thousands of sites that can be used to teach and learn Chinese and one person can't look at them all. Please evaluate the sites according to the following criteria:

1. Suitable and accessible to kids - good navigation

2. Appealing to kids

3. Good material

4. Incorporates rythmn, rhyme and repetition

5. May include songs, rhymes, poems, riddles, jokes, short reading pieces, material from

the content areas (math, science, social studies).

6. Bilingual, monlingual, Mandarin, non-Mandarin simplified, traditional, any country of

origin, pinyin, bo-po-mo-fo, pinyin - it doesn' matter.

I will happily give the first person who posts, and the person whose post I find most useful, a Chinese language book of his or her choice straight off my private bookshelf.

Thanks in advance for your help in getting my forum started and in helping the newbies and all the rest of us locate good study materials.

Thanks,

Kathy

[Meng Lelan]

Oh boy, am I the first to post? Go to www.betterchinese.com and they have free children's stories in Chinese. This site practically lets you custom design a curriculum based on age and Chinese language level. Some of the content require a fee. Magical Tour of China is the best part of this website but it requires a fairly high language level (age 10 to 12 year old).

Lelan

[Kathy]

Please consider the following criteria:

Level appropriateness - The dictionary should not have so much

information that the student cannot find what he/she is looking for.

Ease of use - The user interface is clear. Students should be able to find

what they are looking for without having to click all over the page.

Most common definitions listed first

Accurate - The definitions and other information should be correct and free of

typos. I recently came across a site that had a typo on the section

discussing tone where the meaning of 麻 was given as flex, instead of flax, and where and the

meaning of 罵 was given as swear instead of yell at (which I would have prefered, since that would be the most understandable definition for kids). Chinese is difficult enough for

kids without introducing typos and archaic or out-dated translations.

Sites should be free of distracting or inappropriate advertising. One of my

absolutely favorite dictionaries is inappropriate for kids because of its ads.

What are your thoughts? What are some other points to consider when choosing an online dictionary for kids? Is there a good online dictionary already available, or does one need to be created? hint, hint

[Kathy]

help younger Chinese language learners at the same time.

Is there someone who is willing to make a short list of study tools for young learners? Learning Chinese is starting to enjoy some modest popularity among children. Does anyone have time to make a short list of the sites most suitable for kids? It would be a very good learning experience for the person who does the job (good job for a newbie or seasoned learner) and it would really help parents and students.

Please send the list to me by PM, or post it directly to www.eslwebcamforkids.com/forum/ in the kids' Chinese Corner.

Thanks in advance. PS - If we get have than one list, of course I will just have more than one list the more the merrier.

Thanks,

Kathy

[Toffeeliz]

you don't ask for much do you? maybve you should get in contact with the server that owns the dictionairy you find particularly usefull and see if you can get a similiar version (minus dirty advertisements(sh) ) and host it on your site. I admit this might cost you but you'll probably get it in donations return if you decide to put a donation box up or start charging parents for using the material.

I think as an overall sugestion, that you need a web designer to be brought in. Your use of language definetly shows that your going for a young audiance, my guess is around 8years-13years? in that case you need to brighten up the show! bright colours and shiny things!!!!

Its a real shame they don't have funding for these sorts of things - you know like education grants and stuff. This good turn out to cost you a lot...heh

Overall though, I think your idea is wonderfull. If I have kids, and if your website is still running then (keep in mind I wont be having kids for a looong while ) , i'd deifnetly get my kids on it!

Keep un the good work! 祝你身体好!

P.S - thhey are only suggestions

[Kathy]

You know, that idea never crossed my mind. I think it is a great idea! My thinking was that a dictionary could be repurposed - with some color and pictures - but that is a longterm project and won't solve the immediate problem. You are right about the age group - up to about 13.

In the meantine, I am now working with a young man to make recordings and activities for 5 T'ang Dynasty poems - the most famous, most easy to read, write and memorize, most short... you know me, I always start with a set of criteria (and set the bar high, so that we don't have to go back and rethink and redo the project anytime soon) - in short, the most suitable for kids out of the whole 300. I think we should have the first poem ready to pilot within a couple of days. I will post when it is ready to try. I fugure that if my students try it, and if I can get feedback from students who read this forum, we will have a useful file that will take a bit of the sting out of getting started on classical texts.

[Toffeeliz]

5 Tang dynasty poems? I shall have to listen when they are ready! I have a bit of a classical-text fear when it comes to english, nevermiond Chinese!

[Kathy]

If you would like a poem that has been edited with pauses for repeats, just PM me with an email address that allows attachments. What I have a recording of is Number 031, by 韦应物 , a 五言古诗, as follows:

夕次盱眙县

落帆逗淮镇，

停舫临孤驿。

浩浩风起波，

冥冥日沉夕。

人归山郭暗，

雁下芦洲白。

独夜忆秦关，

听钟未眠客。

Don't be scared - if you can learn anything else in Chinese - the names of 9 tasty dishes, perhaps - you can learn this. Just download Audacity, and open the file. Listen to the recording and repeat. Get out a pencil and paper. Transcribe the pinyin or bo-po-mo-fo with either numbers or tone markers. You may have to listen a few times - but that is part of the learning process. If you have trouble, use adsotrans at www.adsotrans.com. Don't like the simplified charaters? No prob - go to www.madarintools.com and convert it. That might take time to to run on your computer, too - but that is also part of the process.

If this poem is not to your liking, wait a day or so and we will have poems that are muuuuuch easier to read, write, and understand. Out of 300 poems we are using the 5 easiest and most famous. There are many reasons for doing this project, but one of them is to enhance morale. I figure that students can either say, "Next month I am planning to begin the second volume of the kindergarten level, state-mandated Mandarin textbook," or they can say, "I am just finishing up the second of two poems by Li Bai - the famous T'ang Dynasty poet, and then it is on to Du Fu..." I figure that kids (and everyone else) are just like me. When we piddle around, we want to piddle and call it nothing grander. But when we work, we want to have the sense that we are doing something important and meaningful with our time.

Good luck,

Kathy

[roddy]

T'ang Dynasty poems - the most famous, most easy to read, write and memorize, most short

And of least practical value, surely. I can see there might be a place for them somewhere, but if these (and sorry if I've got this wrong) are what you are starting with and are aimed at teaching kids Chinese, then surely something like a poem or chant that includes numbers, directions, parts of the body. You wouldn't start teaching English from classic poems, you'd start from something like Head, Shoulders Knees and Toes, or 1-potato, 2-potato, 3-potato four . . .

[Kathy]

Settle in. I am long-winded.

Let's put this in perspective: Rythm, rhyme and repetition are excellent features of the easy-to-remember text. However, there comes a time in a student's life when Ni Wa-wa and Liang Ger Lao Hu are no longer appropriate. I have online ESL students who know all the Beatles' old songs. One 11-year old's favorite song is Aaron Neville's cover of Louisiana. He reads on a sixth grade level in English - that includes science and social studies - after two years of studying 1-on-1, 5 days a week.

Non-Chinese kids who study Chinese are not typical students, perhaps, but I have worked with regular classroom public school kids here in Appalachia (which as we know, has a reputation for needing ESL services for its native English speakers- and they learned Chinese too. It helps that there is nothing to do in our small town and learning Chinese is as exotic as their young lives will get.

BTW - I think I might have you to thank for this project, Roddy. Isn't your forum where I answered the call to record a poem for Librivox? I signed up to do a poem, but I had never heard it read by a native speaker and I wanted a model. Anyway - it is where I found the voice talent.

This is what I wrote to Ray, a recent college graduate in China, who is doing the recording and engineering:

RE: 031

I just tried it out with a 10-year old student and have some ideas. First, not every line is of comparable difficulty -some are harder than others, and those need to be broken down into smaller bites. The things that make Chinese pronunciation hard are as follows:

1. Sounds that we don't have in English - especially those with the frictive, palatised consonant combinations, and the 2nd and 4th tones. I will attach a chart showing what the hard-to-pronounce phonemes are.

2. Some combinations of characters are hard to remember - others are easy. I think that many times, non-Chinese and Chinese find the same combinations easy or difficult according to the phonology. For instance, in 31, the 1-4th lines are easy, as is the 8th. But the 5th, 6th and 7th are harder - first one followed by fourth tone is hard for us, and the 4-1-4 combination is even harder.

I am trying to think of a good way to distrubute these files. I think I might try to put them into a Powerpoint presentation with audio first. Do you have PPT on your computer? If so, please create a PPT with the title of poem and the poet's name and the text of the poem. Next link the recording to poem - just the whole file - not bit by bit. Then we can put the PPT up on Chinese-forums and ask people for feedback. I will get feedback from my own students, and use my own experience and judgment. You do the same. I think we will have a great result! Do you know how to do the following:

1. Add pinyin - both ways - numbers and marks

2. Convert traditional to simplified

3. Add bo-po-mo-fo

All of these are very easy to do with the converters and tools on www.mandarintools.com I think it is absolutely necessary to create material that will suit the needs of all Mandarin learners. I also plan to get Hokkien recordings of these poems at the end of the week. They are easier to remember but more difficult to repeat than Mandarin.

I do not think we should spend anymore time on 031 since it is not one that we want to include. It is too hard. Would you please start recording the famous Li Bai one. If students only learn one T'ang Dynasty poem - that should be it.

One thing that I want to accomplish is to develop tools that will help foreigners learn some of the cultural infrastructure behind the language. One time I was watching a Chinese movie with a student who had graduated from a famous university with a degree in Chinese. The movie has the most famous lines from the 三 字 經 and he didn't recognize them. I am sure that if he saw the lines written, he would know immdeiately - but he didn't recognize the lines by listening. That is not good. We have the same situation with English nursery rhymes - ESL students don't regonize them or understand when references are made to them.

Do you have your pick of the other four to record? I do . Let's see if our lists match. BTW - please create a timesheet for yourself in Excel (in English) and record you work hours everytime you do any of this work, then send the file to me when you send the poems.

Take care,

Kathy

So, there is the gist of it. Tomorrow I will post our short list of the 10 poems we are considering. All interested parties can weigh in on the decision of which ones to include.

I wouldn't take up so much space except that I think this discuss really is about some pretty deep pedagogical issues.

Best regards,

Kathy

[kudra]

Let's put this in perspective: Rythm, rhyme and repetition are excellent features of the easy-to-remember text. However, there comes a time in a student's life when Ni Wa-wa and Liang Ger Lao Hu are no longer appropriate. I have online ESL students who know all the Beatles' old songs. One 11-year old's favorite song is Aaron Neville's cover of Louisiana. He reads on a sixth grade level in English - that includes science and social studies - after two years of studying 1-on-1, 5 days a week.

I think the comparison with Beatles songs/lyrics mostly does not hold. My impression is that memorizing some Tang poetry won't have any other utility than that the student will be able to recite those particular poems. This is not to say that it is not a good thing to have some Tang poems under one's belt, but I am skeptical of giving it a leading role in a curriculum. My impression is that the vocabulary and grammar are so much different from spoken Mandarin, or even modern written Mandarin that even if they know what every word means in the poem, they won't be able to use them because it would probably be inappropriate in spoken Mandarin.

I don't think this is the case with Beatles lyrics for the most part.

For example, the third line of the Li Bai poem everyone knows.

ju3 tou2 wang4 ming2 yue4

The verb ju3 appears in the Modern Chinese frequency table at #586.

Whereas it's in position # 319 in a frequency table of Classical Chinese.

While the difference between 586 and 319 doesn't seem huge, I predict this type of mismatch will have a cummulative effect when you look at the sum of the vocabulary introduced by using Tang Poems. Plus the grammar is archaic.

If you compared Beatles lyrics with standard spoken English, I don't think you would see this kind of mismatch in terms of frequency or grammar.

Maybe I got it wrong about the role that Tang poems are to play in your curriculum, but it seems like the hard work is finding/working out the core material for American kids to learn Chinese as a second language. As far as I can tell, this is an unsolved problem.

[gato]

Rythm, rhyme and repetition are excellent features of the easy-to-remember text

The continue the Beatles analogy, maybe you can use modern Chinese pop songs instead of Tang poems?

One should look at why the kids are learning Chinese. Is it just something to do to keep them out of trouble? Or is it so that they can communicate in Chinese? If communication is the goal, then shouldn't you be focused on vocabulary that's used for communication?

[Toffeeliz]

whenever I have come across something remotely ancient in ahciense text/idioms its usually just for pronunciation purposes and to get a feel for the culture

Popsongs though...they're something cool ^_65 <----Guang liang/Tong hua fan

[Kathy]

We are just getting started on a Classical Chinese Audio Library for Kids, which will include audio recordings of excepts from traditional literature including T'ang Dynasty poems (唐詩), by Li Bai and Du Fu, The Art of War (孫子兵法), the Three Character Classic (三字經 ), and The Analects (論 語).

Our plan is to not only record these excepts, but to edit them so that students can listen and practice. My initial thought is that each excerpt should be repeated slowly five times. Next that the excerpt be broken down line by line and looped five times. Then, that the loops be followed by pauses to give students time to repeat. Finally, the file is repeated line by line with pauses, giving the student a chance to record her own voice for comparison.

If you have suggestions about what material to include, please post with the specific text in Chinese.

I would like to follow up with some written practice to use with the audio material. If anyone is interested in contributing with audio recording, audio editing, annotation and explanation, character practice or animation, illustration, games and activities, or other extensions - or in helping organize the project - please let me know. This is a great way to practice and use Chinese - especially editing the audio recordings into downloadable MP3 files.

I think that this project can be valuable not only to kids, but to adult students who would like these kinds of study resources. If you know of other people who are doing this kind of work, kindly let us know.

Thanks,

Kathy

[Kathy]

We now have a group of four working on this little project. We will let you thank us for the excellent work and idea later. The original list of 10 that I came up with are as follows:

44 R Ray didn't say why, but he thought this was inappropriate - too much "Love the

One You're With" sentiment, perhaps?

46 R

224

226 R

227

228 R

232

233

235 R

236 K

249

257 R

Ray cut the ones with R's and I cut the ones with K's.

Even though 235 wouldn't be my first pick of Du Fu, we could do worse and at least it is understandable and has the Three Kingdoms in it, so it is in, despite Ray's challenge, unless someone can come up with a more suitable Du Fu poem. That leaves us with 224, 227, 232, 233, and 249.

The big reveal will come in my next posting, and I think everyone will get a big laugh and your sighs of relief will be audible to me way up here in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Kathy

[kudra]

One more curmudgeonly post

There are many reasons for doing this project, but one of them is to enhance morale. I figure that students can either say, "Next month I am planning to begin the second volume of the kindergarten level, state-mandated Mandarin textbook," or they can say, "I am just finishing up the second of two poems by Li Bai - the famous T'ang Dynasty poet, and then it is on to Du Fu..." I figure that kids (and everyone else) are just like me. When we piddle around, we want to piddle and call it nothing grander. But when we work, we want to have the sense that we are doing something important and meaningful with our time.

2 points:

1. So the problem is morale associated with the state-mandated text. I assume you are talking about text's published in China. I have other posts here where I ranted about the Chicago Public Schools using texts donated from Chinese Ministry of Education. I would urge someone who knows how to write text books to write age appropriate texts for teaching American kids Chinese. This is a huge job because it means a different introductory text for different age groups. There is a similar problem, as discussed here where Somerby talks about the scarcity of reading material appropriate for kids in say 7th grade who read at the 3rd grade level. Likewise, an American 7th grader is not going to want to read intro Chinese texts geared to 1st graders. We don't expect American 1st year college students to learn from kids books -- there are a bunch of texts for college students. Likewise it looks like the market is growing for grammar school level texts. The problem I see is that the authors of the successful College texts, who presumably have a lot of experience teaching in the US, mostly university professors, get adequate professional recognition from writing college texts. I'm not sure they have the professional incentive to write grammar school texts. I wish they did.

2. I am not a comparative Lit major, but my impression is that Tang poetry, although important in the broader cultural context, as roddy suggested, are pretty far out when it comes to utility. Again, going back to the Beatles analogy -- my impression is that having grammar school kids learn a bunch of Tang poems or other passages from classical texts is like having grammar school kids in China, as part of English class, learn Shakespeare sonnets, passages of Milton, or even passages of Chaucer (in Middle English). Hey, maybe they do, and I'm all wet, but this doesn't make sense to me.

Sorry if I come across as overly critical. I agree that the project will be fun and a useful resource to have. I meant my comments more as an appeal to potential grammar school text authors to get busy writing high quality age appropriate texts for learners of Chinese as a Second Language. It seems like the market could be larger than the college text market, and at the moment it appears to be free of any serious competition.

[Kathy]

I should explain a little more about who the students are. When I say beginners, I mean first and second year students. Most non-Chinese kids who study Chinese are very bright and their parents are well-educated - and often the parents are Chinese speakers themselves. They can read and write about 500-1500 characters and know at least 20 songs, rhymes, and can read easy material. I have used traditional material for a long time. The reason the material has endured is that it sticks in people's minds. Of course, some of the material is archaic, but I think that memorizing it early in life makes understanding it later easier. In English, kids learn many songs and rhymes they don't understand until they are older - may not until they are adults. I think that the main point is that they memorize the poem and understand the main idea, common characters and maybe the etymology of one character

We still need to cut two. Any suggestions? I really have not had time to google these in the current Chinese media, but I think that with the exception of 249, they will all stand the test of being widely quoted. As a teacher, I just had to throw in the last one since it so aptly describes my feelings sometimes.

224 鹿柴 Wang Wei

空山不見人， 但聞人語響。 響

返景入深林， 復照青苔上。

227 相思 Wang Wei

紅豆生南國， 春來發幾枝。 發

願君多采擷， 此物最相思。

232 春曉 孟浩然 Meng Huran

春眠不覺曉， 處處聞啼鳥。 處

夜來風雨聲， 花落知多少。

233 夜思 Li Bai

床前明月光， 疑是地上霜。 疑

舉頭望明月， 低頭思故鄉。

235 八陣圖 杜甫 DuFu

功蓋三分國， 名成八陣圖。 圖

江流石不轉， 遺恨失吞吳。

236 登鸛雀樓 王之渙 Wang Zhi Huan

白日依山盡， 黃河入海流。 窮

欲窮千里目， 更上一層樓。

249 尋隱者不遇 賈島 Jia Dao

松下問童子，言師採藥去。 雲

只在此山中， 雲深不知處。

[kudra]

my suggestion.

It is discussed in a dialog in volume 2 of Spoken Standard Chinese, by Huang and Stimson. Vivien Lu read it on the audio tape.

李白乘舟將于行

忽聞岸上踏歌聲

桃花潭水深千尺

不及汪倫送我情

I may have used some incorrect characters.

by the way adso shows 踏 as ta2, but pleco and my memory are ta4.

and for another one 263 will serve them well when they are studying in China and feeling homesick.

[Kathy]

We will add these too. Thanks for the suggestion. Would you like to record them? We can do the editing.

yes, ta - 4th tone

[Kathy]

Ray has finished the first recording, Li Bai's famous poem as follows:

233 夜思 Li Bai

床前明月光， 疑是地上霜。

舉頭望明月， 低頭思故鄉。

He did a really good job of not only the reading, but the editing and engineering, as well. In the end, we will have 10 poems. Next we will get started on the tongue twisters, proverbs, songs, and short stories. If you have any suggestions, just let us know. We will probably not record material that is short enough and easy enough to learn without the longer, phrases-by-phrase recordings.

If you would like to hear or use any of these recordings before they are put on the website, just PM me and I will send them along.

Also, anyone who is interested in writing about in English about Chinese poetry, on a level that is suitable for kids, is invited to help. The more the merrier!

Best regards,

Kathy