Another Sunday, another snow storm. The local Chinese school was cancelled again. My daughter thought it was not fair for her to continue having classes at home while other kids got the day free. My aching back was just telling me that a little bit global warming would be a good thing now.
We are cruising along, starting with the second lesson today. I tried to have three breaks during our class. It might be a bit too much (or too frequent). By the time she came back after the last break, she was not in the mode for class any more. We had to skip the reading material part and call it for a day. Maybe less but longer breaks would work a little better.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Sunday, January 14, 2007
School on a Snow Day
The snow just doesn't stop falling here in Denver and it's bone-chilling cold outside. So much so that our local Chinese school canceled their classes today. Wimps.
But we are warm and cozy inside our own house, so our class went on scheduled. We continued to finish our first lesson as scheduled by our textbook, much in the same way as our first class last week.
My daughter did a fantastic job with her homework from the first week. The assignment has four installments, supposed to be done in four weekdays. Each installment has two readings, one simple character writing, two character card review/games, and a CD-ROM assignment. They are not very hard per se, but it does take time to finish them all. She did not do it strictly in the an installment per day manner but nonetheless she finished them all. It's a great job!
The homework has also helped her quite significantly. Since most of them are repetitive reading and character learning drills, she got to know her lesson text very well. When she "left" our first class, she could only barely read the lesson text. But she read it quite fluently when she "came back" today. It's very encouraging.
Besides, she said it was kind of fun doing them. It was much better than what she used to have to do for the Chinese school.
As for the lesson itself, I am still amazed on the pace we are having in keeping with the one-lesson-two-weeks schedule. I did skim over a little bit on a few things, including the lengthy reading material. I did not require her to learn to read them all. I read and explained them during our class and told her to simply read silently and try to comprehend them during her homework time. Since we are on a fast pace, I am thinking that maybe we will take a break after a couple of lessons and revisit these reading material a little bit more.
Of course, as we keep going forward, it will be interesting to see what happens when the novelty starts to wear off.
But we are warm and cozy inside our own house, so our class went on scheduled. We continued to finish our first lesson as scheduled by our textbook, much in the same way as our first class last week.
My daughter did a fantastic job with her homework from the first week. The assignment has four installments, supposed to be done in four weekdays. Each installment has two readings, one simple character writing, two character card review/games, and a CD-ROM assignment. They are not very hard per se, but it does take time to finish them all. She did not do it strictly in the an installment per day manner but nonetheless she finished them all. It's a great job!
The homework has also helped her quite significantly. Since most of them are repetitive reading and character learning drills, she got to know her lesson text very well. When she "left" our first class, she could only barely read the lesson text. But she read it quite fluently when she "came back" today. It's very encouraging.
Besides, she said it was kind of fun doing them. It was much better than what she used to have to do for the Chinese school.
As for the lesson itself, I am still amazed on the pace we are having in keeping with the one-lesson-two-weeks schedule. I did skim over a little bit on a few things, including the lengthy reading material. I did not require her to learn to read them all. I read and explained them during our class and told her to simply read silently and try to comprehend them during her homework time. Since we are on a fast pace, I am thinking that maybe we will take a break after a couple of lessons and revisit these reading material a little bit more.
Of course, as we keep going forward, it will be interesting to see what happens when the novelty starts to wear off.
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Our First Class!
We officially opened our home school this morning at 10:30. There was no fanfare we just went right into our first lesson.
Our textbook is the Stanford Chinese school one reviewed earlier. I had worried about whether there was too much material to cover in the two weeks per lesson schedule. But to my pleasant surprise, we covered half of the lesson without rushing in our two-hour class session! Looks like we will be able to follow the schedule forward, which would be a fairly fast pace.
The first lesson's main text is a simplified monkeys-fetching-moon-out-of-water story, apparently originated from Tibet. The text is quite short. Before the class, I had marked my daughter's copy with Pinyin on some of the characters, as I knew she would have difficulty without them. We started with my reading and then explaining the story. Then She read after me line by line, with frequent repeats to correct some pronunciations. We did this three or four times and then took a five-minute break.
After the first break, we reviewed new characters with the flashcards supplied by the textbook. Then we went over some new phrases. I had her doing the writing exercises in the book and then went over the "grammar points". A couple of the grammar points were a little hard to explain clearly. She also got tired and frustrated when I asked her to read after me on the sample sentences. So we took another break.
By now it was about half an hour before our finish time. I read a version of the tadpole-looking-for-mommy story which was included as this week's reading material. This story is actually more than five times in length than the lesson text. But it is made up with same structures with a lot of repetition. My daughter was actually able to comprehend much of the story just from my reading it. (In comparison, she did not get much from listening to the monkeys story for the first time.)
After going through the reading material, we returned to the main text, and did one more "follow-me" reading. Then I explained the homework structure from the textbook, which includes a CD-ROM. With that, we concluded our first lesson. We were about five minutes early.
It was a good class. Although she did get frustrated in the middle of it, she said later she had a good time too. She felt that this was a lot better than going to Chinese school and also she learned more this way. It made a huge difference now that she understood everything since almost all of my instructions were in English.
I also realized that home-schooling is a lot more intensive than regular school. Since she is the only student present, she is the target of attention and focus all the time. In the future, I may need to find ways to "leave her alone" a little bit more and/or having more frequent breaks.
Our textbook is the Stanford Chinese school one reviewed earlier. I had worried about whether there was too much material to cover in the two weeks per lesson schedule. But to my pleasant surprise, we covered half of the lesson without rushing in our two-hour class session! Looks like we will be able to follow the schedule forward, which would be a fairly fast pace.
The first lesson's main text is a simplified monkeys-fetching-moon-out-of-water story, apparently originated from Tibet. The text is quite short. Before the class, I had marked my daughter's copy with Pinyin on some of the characters, as I knew she would have difficulty without them. We started with my reading and then explaining the story. Then She read after me line by line, with frequent repeats to correct some pronunciations. We did this three or four times and then took a five-minute break.
After the first break, we reviewed new characters with the flashcards supplied by the textbook. Then we went over some new phrases. I had her doing the writing exercises in the book and then went over the "grammar points". A couple of the grammar points were a little hard to explain clearly. She also got tired and frustrated when I asked her to read after me on the sample sentences. So we took another break.
By now it was about half an hour before our finish time. I read a version of the tadpole-looking-for-mommy story which was included as this week's reading material. This story is actually more than five times in length than the lesson text. But it is made up with same structures with a lot of repetition. My daughter was actually able to comprehend much of the story just from my reading it. (In comparison, she did not get much from listening to the monkeys story for the first time.)
After going through the reading material, we returned to the main text, and did one more "follow-me" reading. Then I explained the homework structure from the textbook, which includes a CD-ROM. With that, we concluded our first lesson. We were about five minutes early.
It was a good class. Although she did get frustrated in the middle of it, she said later she had a good time too. She felt that this was a lot better than going to Chinese school and also she learned more this way. It made a huge difference now that she understood everything since almost all of my instructions were in English.
I also realized that home-schooling is a lot more intensive than regular school. Since she is the only student present, she is the target of attention and focus all the time. In the future, I may need to find ways to "leave her alone" a little bit more and/or having more frequent breaks.
Saturday, January 6, 2007
Speaking of Tones in Chinese
Friday, January 5, 2007
It's Two Days before Our Classes
Finally, our home schooling will officially start this Sunday. It will be exciting, or interesting, or both. Before we start, I talked with my daughter on a few issues, mostly our goals and ground rules.
Goals
I would like to set a few goals that we can check our progress against in a later time. These will be goals for both of us. It is not a trivial task since I have no reference to base upon and language skills are usually hard to measure. To start it off, I decided just to have a near-term, namely six-month goals:
Start talking in Chinese may be the hardest of them all, as it involves both language skills and mental confidence, as well as willingness.
What are not in the goals are other basic language skills such as writing of characters, constructing sentences, and phrases. These will of course remain the essential parts of our lessons and exercises. But I decided to leave them out of goals for now so we have a better focus.
Rules
We agreed on two basic rules:
I had thought of making a calendar for our school year or semester or quarter. But I am still not sure what our weekly pace should be. We will be mainly using the Standford textbook, which covers a lesson every two weeks. I thought two weeks may not be enough from where we are starting. But I am not sure whether to spend three or four weeks in one lesson.
So, we don't have a school calendar yet. We will reevaluate that after we go through a couple of lessons and see how we are doing by that point. The biggest advantage of home-schooling is the flexibility, right?
Goals
I would like to set a few goals that we can check our progress against in a later time. These will be goals for both of us. It is not a trivial task since I have no reference to base upon and language skills are usually hard to measure. To start it off, I decided just to have a near-term, namely six-month goals:
- Learning Characters: She should be able to recognize at least 200 characters out of the most-frequently-used 500.
- Pronunciation: She should have a marked, recognizable improvement in her pronunciations.
- Talking: She should start to speak Chinese in some simply, daily conversations. She may be able to speak comprehensible Chinese mixed with English words where her Chinese vocabulary is lacking.
Start talking in Chinese may be the hardest of them all, as it involves both language skills and mental confidence, as well as willingness.
What are not in the goals are other basic language skills such as writing of characters, constructing sentences, and phrases. These will of course remain the essential parts of our lessons and exercises. But I decided to leave them out of goals for now so we have a better focus.
Rules
We agreed on two basic rules:
- We will have a two-hour class session (with breaks) every week, mostly on Sundays. During the class period, all her regular school rules apply. She should behave just as she does in her school classes.
- We will have weekly homework assignments and she is expected to finish them before the next class. She probably will be doing her homework with her Mom so that she has a different learning environment than our classes.
I had thought of making a calendar for our school year or semester or quarter. But I am still not sure what our weekly pace should be. We will be mainly using the Standford textbook, which covers a lesson every two weeks. I thought two weeks may not be enough from where we are starting. But I am not sure whether to spend three or four weeks in one lesson.
So, we don't have a school calendar yet. We will reevaluate that after we go through a couple of lessons and see how we are doing by that point. The biggest advantage of home-schooling is the flexibility, right?
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Are We Good or Are We Weird?
In the Peter Rabbit play, Cottontail has a very simple line "We are always good", which I translated as "我们总是乖的". Whenever my daughter is reading this line, she would sound a lot more like "我们总是怪的". I told her that would mean "We are always weird". We had a great laugh about it.
The characters 乖 and 怪 sound basically the same, except for their tones. The first is a flat (first) tone and the other is a dropping (fourth) tone in Pinyin. When I teach my daughter how to pronounce the words individually, she does it correctly. But when we read that sentence, she just could not get it right.
Then I realized that this is a common pronunciation problem for people who speak English, which is an intonation language. In English, words do not have tones on their own and their tones can change according to their placement in a sentence and the sentence itself. Typically, the tone is rising toward the end of a question ("Are we good?") but falling toward the end of a statement ("We are good."). When an English speaker reads a sentence in Chinese, a tonal language, he/she would still intuitively change the tone in the same way. Therefore we have the incorrect pronunciations.
To confirm this, I had my daughter reading a few different sentences in Chinese:
Once we identified the source of the problem, I explained to her what was going on. It made sense to her too. She would pay more attention to this later. But It will take quite a while to correct, as habits carried over from native tongue are always hard to fight against. But it's okay, we are still having great laughs with her proclamation that we are always weird!
The characters 乖 and 怪 sound basically the same, except for their tones. The first is a flat (first) tone and the other is a dropping (fourth) tone in Pinyin. When I teach my daughter how to pronounce the words individually, she does it correctly. But when we read that sentence, she just could not get it right.
Then I realized that this is a common pronunciation problem for people who speak English, which is an intonation language. In English, words do not have tones on their own and their tones can change according to their placement in a sentence and the sentence itself. Typically, the tone is rising toward the end of a question ("Are we good?") but falling toward the end of a statement ("We are good."). When an English speaker reads a sentence in Chinese, a tonal language, he/she would still intuitively change the tone in the same way. Therefore we have the incorrect pronunciations.
To confirm this, I had my daughter reading a few different sentences in Chinese:
- "乖孩子."("Good kid."). This is a statement, but the word 乖 is at the beginning of the sentence where the tone tends to be flat. She indeed did well with it.
- "我们乖吗?"("Are we good?"). This is a question, with 乖 near the end. Again, she did very well with it.
- "我们总是乖的". Back to our original statement sentence. She reverted back to mispronounce it!
Once we identified the source of the problem, I explained to her what was going on. It made sense to her too. She would pay more attention to this later. But It will take quite a while to correct, as habits carried over from native tongue are always hard to fight against. But it's okay, we are still having great laughs with her proclamation that we are always weird!
Wednesday, January 3, 2007
Peter Rabbit for the Holiday
I have been thinking a lot about how to get my daughter to work on some materials that are close to her own life in Chinese. The Stanford Chinese text book, although very good, also lacks in this aspect. I think kids need to learn dialogs in life-like context before or along with studying story-like textbooks.
During the holidays, I did one experiment. Before the winter break, my daughter had participated in a KidStage production of Peter Rabbit show in her school. She was very enthusiastic about the whole project. Within weeks of receiving the script, she had memorized all her own (Cottontail) lines and most of other characters' lines. The show, although a very small production, was a fun experience for all the kids involved.
I found the dialogs in this script to be simple, concise, and cheerful. So I spent some time to translate them into Chinese and see if my daughter would also enjoy learning them in Chinese.
It did not go well at the beginning. Although she was very curious and enthusiastic about it, she was quickly discouraged by most of the characters she could not recognize, pronounce, or remember. So she decided not to do it again. "It is just not helping!" she said.
After a couple of days, I suddenly realized what the problem might be. After translating the script, I simply typed up the Chinese characters and printed them out. I did not include any Pinyin for the characters she did not know. Even though the lines are very simple, she could not remember the pronunciation of all characters and therefore she could not continue to read her lines.
So I went back to the script and asked her to identify the characters she did not know. Then I hand-marked the Pinyin for them. Hooray! Now she can read her lines. She is happy again. We did a few scenes together with her reading her (Cottontail's) lines and me reading everybody else's. Although she can not memorize her lines and have to rely on Pinyin frequently, she is getting used to the pronunciation of a lot of words she hasn't learned yet.
The best thing yet, I didn't have to always ask her to do this. She was asking me to do it with her! Because it is fun.
We will continue to use this script and have her learn more characters' lines. I believe she can learn a lot of new characters and dialogs this way.
This experiment also cast more doubt I had with the no-Pinyin philosophy for earlier grades of the Stanford Chinese textbook. While we will use the textbook when we officially start our home schooling this weekend, I think I will have to supply some Pinyin to help my daughter with the text.
During the holidays, I did one experiment. Before the winter break, my daughter had participated in a KidStage production of Peter Rabbit show in her school. She was very enthusiastic about the whole project. Within weeks of receiving the script, she had memorized all her own (Cottontail) lines and most of other characters' lines. The show, although a very small production, was a fun experience for all the kids involved.
I found the dialogs in this script to be simple, concise, and cheerful. So I spent some time to translate them into Chinese and see if my daughter would also enjoy learning them in Chinese.
It did not go well at the beginning. Although she was very curious and enthusiastic about it, she was quickly discouraged by most of the characters she could not recognize, pronounce, or remember. So she decided not to do it again. "It is just not helping!" she said.
After a couple of days, I suddenly realized what the problem might be. After translating the script, I simply typed up the Chinese characters and printed them out. I did not include any Pinyin for the characters she did not know. Even though the lines are very simple, she could not remember the pronunciation of all characters and therefore she could not continue to read her lines.
So I went back to the script and asked her to identify the characters she did not know. Then I hand-marked the Pinyin for them. Hooray! Now she can read her lines. She is happy again. We did a few scenes together with her reading her (Cottontail's) lines and me reading everybody else's. Although she can not memorize her lines and have to rely on Pinyin frequently, she is getting used to the pronunciation of a lot of words she hasn't learned yet.
The best thing yet, I didn't have to always ask her to do this. She was asking me to do it with her! Because it is fun.
We will continue to use this script and have her learn more characters' lines. I believe she can learn a lot of new characters and dialogs this way.
This experiment also cast more doubt I had with the no-Pinyin philosophy for earlier grades of the Stanford Chinese textbook. While we will use the textbook when we officially start our home schooling this weekend, I think I will have to supply some Pinyin to help my daughter with the text.
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