Chinese Learning Resources

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I homeschool my children in reading and writing in Chinese. At home, our spoken Chinese is Cantonese so many of my resources focus on that dialect.

Please let me know if you have any additional resources that you have found helpful.

Books:

Sage 500 from Hong Kong:

I primarily use these learning books with my children. Sage 500 teaches children the most often used 500 characters of the Chinese language. I’ve written about how I use these books to teach my kids here.

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Facebook Groups:

• Cantonese Parents
• Cantonese American Parents
• Raising Bilingual Children in Chinese & English
• Homeschooling Young Kids in Chinese

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Apps:

• Train Chinese
  • This app is great for teachin how to write a Chinese character because it will animate the character in both Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Tip: if your default app setting is traditional, then to animate the simplified text, simple hold down the simplified character until the option for “Animation” shows up, then click on it.
  • I also use this app to make lists of the important characters that we reference often – like my children’s names. Go to “Training” and “New” to create a list.

• Chinese Writer
  • This app helps children with the correct brushstroke of characters and turns it into a game. Characters fall down (like Tetris tiles) from the top of the screen and you have to tap and draw the character with the correct strokes before it hits the bottom. My children love this app.
  • You can create custom character lists instead of using the default list. For example, I’ve created a character list for each of the Sage 500 series (so a total of 5 character lists). This helps my children practice the characters they’ve already learned.

• Pleco
  • Pleco is very useful if you want to learn how to pronounce a word in Cantonese as well as Mandarin. It also shows pinyin and jyutpin, as well as traditional and simplified characters.
  • Also a very powerful and handy dictionary.

• Google Translate
  • Sometimes I know how the Chinese character is written but I can’t seem to obtain the right definition in Pleco so I will turn to Google Translate and write the word on my iPhone which then shows me the pinyin that I can then cut and past into Pleco

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Do you home school your kids in Chinese? Do you have any recommended resources to help kids learn Chinese?

I would love to hear about your journey – please share by leaving me a comment below.