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.