Teaching Babies Mandarin

I first noticed that Mr. B was interested in Chinese when he was about 18 months old. We were in my car and I was listening to my Chinese language CDs and Mr. B started repeating some of the words he heard.

Initially I purchased the entire Gordon & Li Li collection (new) by Michele Wong McSween with the hope that Mr. B would like looking at the cute animals and pictures.

Unfortunately, when Mr. B was a baby he preferred real photographs of animals and objects to animated ones and we never used these books. Maybe Baby G will like these. 

Instead, Berlitz’s My House Lift-The-FlapBoard Book is one of Mr. B's favorite resources (I found this used at a library bookstore). It is one of his most requested books and introduces a lot of great vocabulary.

Little Pim: Fun with Langague DVDS: To get Mr. B really started learning Chinese, we got him Little Pim’s Chinese language DVDs Volume I at around 18 months (new). Although we loved this collection, there were a few issues. There was no pinyin accompanying the words introduced so I had to look on littlepim.com in order to confirm how to pronounce many of the words and phrases. From the Amazon reviews I also learned that the person speaking the Mandarin words has a strong village accent. Therefore, some of the words she used were very different from ones we had learned from other books and resources. 

Other than that, these DVDs were a huge hit. They show young children going about their day-to-day activities. DVD 1 shows children eating breakfast, lunch and dinner and baking a cake. DVD 2 shows children waking up, getting ready for the day, taking a nap and getting ready for bed. DVD 3 shows children playing dress up, outside, at the park, etc. All three DVD have some great segments of children playing with cats and dogs. Apart from introducing Mr. B to a lot of words in Chinese ("180 words and phrases"), the DVD shows how babies, toddlers and older children go about their day.

A few months later we added Little Pim's Volume II to our collection. Mr. B liked this series even more because of Little Pim's friends. I like Volume II because the pinyin is used and the word pronunciations are similar to what we are used to (the editors fixed the issues with Volume I).

I'm not sure how much Mr. B actually learned from these DVDS. He loved watching them but I think the actual learning came from reviewing the words and phrases introduced by these movies after the fact. Using the Companion Guides and Scripts from the Little Pim website, I put together a visual guide based on each  DVD for Mr. B using pictures from his life to illustrate the vocabulary  (i.e. a picture of our house for "house"). We review and discuss these guides all the time.

Mr. B loved this series so much that I decided to get him something a little more baby friendly for the car (something more fun than my adult CDs). 

Let's Learn Mandarin Chinese with Miss Panda was an instant hit and is Mr. B's number one choice for the car. We memorized several of the songs and singe them all the time. We HIGHLY recommend this CD! 

My First Chinese Words Set is an excellent collection of 36 books with a CD for pronunciation. I think that I got a good deal on this through Ebay (used but in perfect condition). These books are written with traditional characters and the pinyin translation is included only the first time the character is used in each books (so you are forced to learn the characters as you read). The books are cute simple stories. So far Baby G loves them and Mr. B has listened to a few.

We have not yet used the workbooks (used) and dictionary (new) but plan to introduce them as the kids get older.

I should mention one more amazing resource that I sort of created. I found Usborne's First 100 Words in Spanish at a thrift store. It is internet linked so I was able to write in the Chinese translation of the words.  Voila! We now have the First 100 Words in Chinese. This book is available on Usborne's website. Mr. B loves this one! Each section shows a cute family doing an activity together (i.e. eating breakfast, playing together, etc.) and includes 7-9 vocabulary words relating to that activity that you can discuss. This is one of our most used resources.

I also have the first 1000 Words in Spanish for when Mr. B is older. It's going to take forever to translate into Chinese!