Watching my kiddo learning to read has been crazy cool. The number of mental leaps required for reading that we now take for granted as adults is absolutely insane. It’s been 6 weeks since my last post. Here’s an update.
Last time I posted that my son had started using the iHuman Chinese app to learn Chinese characters and was loving it. He is still loving it and may in fact be slightly addicted to the app. We have had to reduce all other screentime during the week and put some limits on when he can “study Chinese” since often there are meltdowns when we ask him to stop. On the other hand, because we limit rather than encourage him to “learn Chinese”, it is more like eating dessert than eating vegetables, and he completely owns the learning process. He is motivated, takes initiative, and is excited about learning Chinese. In my eyes, this is absolutely a win, because this is where bilingual parents struggle the most!
We also started using flash cards. In iHuman Chinese, when you first learn a new character, there is an animation of collecting a digital character flash card. We already had some flash cards lying around from a different curriculum we hadn’t started yet (it’s book based, so it’s less engaging and fun and more serious) so I started giving my son a real flash card for each character he learned in the app. He’s always excited to collect a new character card, and watching the flash cards pile up has been super cool for me.
The flash cards have been another real win. Rather than using them to “study” and test memorization, we use these as physical building blocks to create phrases and sentences to read together. My son can associate sounds and even meanings with individual characters, but when we string together longer phrases, I can see that he’s not really reading with comprehension. He’s just stringing sounds together. He loves to string together a long nonsensical sequence of characters for me to read, and then he giggles like crazy, while I string together 3-4 character phrases for him to read. It’s become a fun, open-ended, and exploratory game.
Last night I made some new flash cards – one featuring his Chinese name so that he can be the star of some of our sentences – and he wanted to make his own: 山. The stroke order was wrong but it was definitely a legible 山, which he wrote out fully from memory. I am so excited to keep watching him learn!
Etymology Adventures 