Learning to Read and Write Mandarin Chinese
By Rachel (Jan 2022)
Mandarin Chinese is one of the hardest languages in the world because of the writing system. There’s no alphabet in the language, but there are are something called radicals. Some characters (words) are made of more than radical. Sometimes you can even guess at the meaning or sound of the word by the radical. In English some words you can pronounce by using phonics and some words are site words- where the word is a sign in itself. In Chinese it’s almost as if every word was a site word and there are no individual letters. That means that in order to read Chinese, you need to learn tons of characters! Most children in schools in China spend hours every night after a long day at school writing characters to learn them.
In Charlotte Mason’s Home Education book (pages 199-222), she talks about a method for kids to learn to read English. It alternates between phonics/spelling lessons and site words so that the class is exciting and different each day for the student. Since Chinese only has site words and sometimes uses radicals, it’s great to follow a variation of her method for Chinese. Some days work on radicals but most days will be working on learning the whole character as a site word.
There is a type of phonics for Chinese that spells out in letters the characters. This is called pinyin. The system was devised by a team led by Zhou Youguang in the 1950s and came up with a way to spell out each character. Chinese has four tones so this system also allows for the marking of the four tones. Since pinyin uses a proper alphabet, the system lets people to type in pinyin and the characters come up on the screen (on phones, computers, or other electronic devices) and they choose the right character for the word (the majority of sounds have anywhere from five to thirty or more words that use that sound).
For our own family, we have chosen not to teach our kids pinyin until they have a good few years worth of characters, starting in first grade. We didn’t want them to get pinyin mixed up with learning to read and write in English. Most schools in China teach pinyin starting from kindergarten so they learn pinyin first and then learn characters as they grow up. One of the questions I like to ask children is what is their favorite class and what is their least favorite class. Often their least favorite class is Chinese because it’s so boring the way it’s taught and they have hours of homework each night for it. I don’t want my kids to think of it as boring. I personally enjoy learning Chinese characters and hope my kids will too.
When it comes to writing, try not to have the student write a few characters together in a line. What happens is that the eye naturally looks to the character before it to see how to write it. That means that the first time writing it, it will look ok. The second time the student will often just refer back to the character they wrote last and then write it, which means that it might not look like it should. By the time you get to the end of the line, it’s really different from the typed character in the beginning of the line. The best way is to write one character after each printed one. The key is that the character that the student sees should be the printed one, not the one that they wrote. Some ways to make writing fun would be to have the student write the character in the air, write it in chalk, write it with a stick in the dirt, etc.
When it comes to reading, it’s great to choose a short story. Type it (or copy it) so you just have the words. This is a big thing because a lot of students start to make up the story based on the pictures instead of the words. If there are no pictures, they have to depend on the words. Make a few copies of the text. Cut out each character in one of the copies, then cut out each sentence in another character, and then cut out each page of words. It sounds like it takes a lot of time, but it’s worth it.
After you get all of this ready, take the first character in the sentence. Have the student look at it and try and take a picture of it in their mind. Then put out the whole sentence of characters and have him or her choose that one character from them. You can have a book or just use the chalkboard to write down the characters as they learn them. Then do the next word in the sentence in a similar way. Try and make sentences and a combination of sentences with the words that they’ve learned. For any character in these made up sentences that they don’t know, put a dried bean or a button or something (a “counter”) to show that that’s a word yet to be learned. By having the students use “counters” it wets their appetite to learn more characters.
After you finish one sentence of characters, put out the characters from that sentence. Read the sentence out loud and have the student find the characters as you say them. Then have the student read them himself or herself on their own. Keep each lesson to ten to fifteen minutes. If they learn a few characters each lesson, the words they learn will grow fast. Also review the characters they learned in the previous lesson in the beginning of the lesson. By reviewing like this, it reinforces the characters in the student’s mind.
As a side note, reading and writing should not be started until the student can speak and listen to a good amount of Chinese. Oral language should come first because it’s more interesting to children.
I’ve put together three books about learning Chinese characters. The first book has three short stories in Chinese. Each story builds on and uses the characters in the story before them. The first year and second year books have three stories each (one per term for a three term school year) and the third year has ten stories (each building and adding to the characters learned before). They’re all available on www.lulu.com (look for “Rachel Bubb” or “Learning Characters Using the Charlotte Mason Method”) as a printed book or a PDF that you can print out on your own or on amazon (printed book only). For our writing practice, we print out the story that we’re working on in a lighter ink and then my kids just write over the characters in the lighter ink. They either do a full page (if it’s in big print and doesn’t take long) or part of a page with the timer on. The key is to not make this writing class long. If it’s too long it’ll be boring and the students will lose interest.
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