The Chinese book of the month is called "Yes! Chinese" 朗朗中文 textbook 1A

 The Yes! Chinese materials have four different series - Starter, Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. Today, my evaluation will be focusing on the Starter set. The Chinese Starter set includes both a text book and a work book. What I like the most about this book is the duo language translation for each lesson. Unlike most materials from China, this material has both English and Chinese on each topic, content, and instruction. For non-Chinese readers, you will be able to understand the lessons and complete the homework assignments. I also like the cartoon characters, picture layout, font size and the color on the book. For young learner between age 4 to age 11, the book is easy to read and follow.

Many young learners between age 4 and 6 think in pictures. Whether we realize it or not, we often visualize what we are attempting to learn to help solidify the information in our memories. I personally think the content of this material was too difficult and complex for young beginners who do not have any Chinese language background. For example, lesson 1 in textbook 1A starts teaching how to greet people. The new characters from that lesson are “你nǐ，好hǎo， 老lǎo，师shī，我wǒ，叫jiào. I am sure many adult learners found this topic to be very useful in everyday life. However, it does not apply to young learners. All of these characters have more than five strokes which are very difficult to young learns to memorize without learning the stroke order. Stroke order knowledge is an important handwriting skill in Chinese reflecting the characteristics of the Chinese orthography. Before we go any further, we have to understand what children can process at different ages. Adults can hold chunks of information in their short term memory, each chunk contains 7 ± 2 items. In contrast, 2 year old children can hold about 2 items, 5 year old children can hold about 4 items, 7 year old children can hold about 5 items.

Furthermore, the textbook does not have writing sections to help young learners to trace strokes on each new character as classwork. Most of my students between age 4 and age 5 have struggle to learn new words with more than 5 stokes. I found it is extremely helpful for students to work on the writing in class so that they will get familiar with the word.

Tips: As you know, children love to draw. Making flashcards with colorful pictures that relate to the characters can be an effective learning tool. In addition, teachers or parents can have children draw their own pictures of each word to help them link each character with the respective pictures.