With Mandarin gaining traction to being one of the hot languages at the moment with young learners specially among the high profile wealthy families not just for the swath of cognitive, health and educational benefits but also because mandarin is a language with the most native speakers and being home to a growing China, meaning it going to continue to be important for business in the future.
Now of you are looking to learn mandarin for kids or if you are a young learner looking to learn mandarin, here are a few tips and steps to getting started with mandarin.
Finding a partner
If you are a parent, start out by speaking or learning the language with your children. This is a guaranteed to make a ton of difference to your child while learning something like mandarin. This applicable to self-learning young audience, if you can find a person to speak or learn with, it will help. A person to speak your newly learned mandarin words, phrases and sentences will make for stronger retention, however remember consistency is key and it gets difficult with a lazy partner.
Learn using your senses
Young minds are always bubbling with energy and hence they love hands on experiences which call for the use of the different senses. A pro tip is to take the learning process slowly, starting out with one word, one phrase, and one sentence at a time and then adding up slowly. This kind of immersive learning helps the young minds latch on to the idea with better visuals and experiences in the brain.
Reading aloud or listening to stories
Story time in Chinese with books that children are familiar with in their native language can have a magical effect. For non-Chinese speaking parents you can use reading videos online. Evaluate how much your child naturally follows the story. Reading boosts early literacy and serves as a bonding time for you and your child on your bilingual journey. It naturally builds up vocabulary, sentence patterns and native language skills.
Another aspect of this exercise is by simply trying to read aloud stories and other activities inspired by reading out instructions are all huge leaping steps to help you and your child pick up the language.
Do you have a Chinese brush, inkpad, and ink stone set? This classic way of writing Chinese draws children in much more than a pen, pencil, crayon or marker. Writing with a Chinese brush is an exciting way for children to have fun with Chinese characters.
All these combined with a well-meaning course online or otherwise should have your children speaking mandarin in a fast nearing future.