Teaching Chinese at Home
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jollyme:
For comics for older kids, you might wish to consider the series by 翁添保。 Some of his books are 这一班日记 (books 1 and 2), 乐在其中，一本正经漫画之家在新加坡。But this series of comics are more like comic strips , whereas in 多啦A梦 each chapter surrounds one adventure/escapade.keltong:
Found 多啦A梦 at Sembawang Shopping Centre Popular today. I think I will finish reading before my boy...haha....saw 18 books in the series (not sure got more or not) and bought 6. This is for my P5 boy who HATES chinese. Haiz...hope to read with him .....
thanks keltong for sharing, i hope to buy this for my P6 nephew, hope he will grow to love chinese..not sure if its too late
However, just to digress abit, I am not sure about the use of comics to get kids to read or be interested in Chinese.
For me, the purpose of reading is to get children to pick up (though informally, that is, not direct teaching, otherwise reading would not be a pleasure acitivity) vocabulary, sentence structures, writing styles, and of course, other \"hidden\" things like morals, values and culture.
If the objectives of getting children to read Chinese is to expose them to good language and vocabulary, then comics might not be able to serve this objective well as the language tend to be truncated and alot of things need not be addressed in the written text as they can be conveyed via the illustrations/drawings.
Reluctant readers might be more willing to pick up a comic book as comics migth be more accessible (less daunting than picking up a \"proper\" storybook) and attractive (with the pictures and colours) to them. However, I am not sure whether these reluctant readers will progress beyond comics to read storybooks.
I advocate starting with storybooks and when they are reading to a certain extent, to let them read comics as a different type of genre (other genres are storybooks, information books, magazines, newspapers, brochures etc). -
MyBaby:
For comics for older kids, you might wish to consider the series by 翁添保。 Some of his books are 这一班日记 (books 1 and 2), 乐在其中，一本正经漫画之家在新加坡。But this series of comics are more like comic strips , whereas in 多啦A梦 each chapter surrounds one adventure/escapade.jollyme:
[quote=\"keltong\"]Found 多啦A梦 at Sembawang Shopping Centre Popular today. I think I will finish reading before my boy...haha....saw 18 books in the series (not sure got more or not) and bought 6. This is for my P5 boy who HATES chinese. Haiz...hope to read with him .....
thanks keltong for sharing, i hope to buy this for my P6 nephew, hope he will grow to love chinese..not sure if its too late
However, just to digress abit, I am not sure about the use of comics to get kids to read or be interested in Chinese.
For me, the purpose of reading is to get children to pick up (though informally, that is, not direct teaching, otherwise reading would not be a pleasure acitivity) vocabulary, sentence structures, writing styles, and of course, other \"hidden\" things like morals, values and culture.
If the objectives of getting children to read Chinese is to expose them to good language and vocabulary, then comics might not be able to serve this objective well as the language tend to be truncated and alot of things need not be addressed in the written text as they can be conveyed via the illustrations/drawings.
Reluctant readers might be more willing to pick up a comic book as comics migth be more accessible (less daunting than picking up a \"proper\" storybook) and attractive (with the pictures and colours) to them. However, I am not sure whether these reluctant readers will progress beyond comics to read storybooks.
I advocate starting with storybooks and when they are reading to a certain extent, to let them read comics as a different type of genre (other genres are storybooks, information books, magazines, newspapers, brochures etc).[/quote]MyBaby,
Reading Chinese comics is purely for enjoyment. It is for the purpose of showing kids who hate Chinese that they can find fun and laughter in Chinese books. For these reluctant readers, parents should read the comics with them, and then slowly introduce story books to them. So long as parents guide them along the way, they should be able to progress to long novels.
Besides comics, parents can should let your kids read the long list of excellent picture books in my blog.
http://tamarindvillage.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-raise-bilingual-child.html
However, P5 kids may find some of these picture books to \"baby-ish\" for them, even though they may not even be able to read them independently. I feel that comic books like the Doraemon series has more complicated plots and are easier for them to read.
I think that comic books are an excellent way of learning oral Chinese, because all the text are conversations. In fact, I learned almost all my spoken mandarin from reading the Doraemon series because I did not grow up in a mandarin speaking family.
I totally agree with you that in order to write good compositions, kids must certainly read tons of story books besides comics. Reading comics alone is not going to help kids get 90+ marks in Chinese.
I also want to recommend this very interesting series of books :
雾灵三部曲（全3册
http://product.dangdang.com/product.aspx?product_id=20692397
It is part comics, and part novel. The 1st chapter is comics, the 2nd chapter is novel, the 3rd chapter is comics, the 4th chapter is novel and so on. The plot is about far in the future when humans are extinct and animals can talk, complicated enough to keep any child interested. However, the Chinese text is not easy to read for our average P5 kids, parental guidance is necessary.
I think that the most important thing to do is to instill a love for Chinese in kids. The best way to do this is to find books with content that will interest them. Then they will be motivated to learn the language in order to read the book. The following customer review from dangdang, for the books 雾灵三部曲, is a good example :
看当当推荐得厉害，所以买了这套书。
没想到儿子如此喜欢！
他6岁，新晋绿领巾，正在学习“我是小学生”一类的语文，大概认识了200个字啦，以前的故事都是我读他听，而这本可是我们共同读的。为了能读这本书，他一点都不拖拉地完成老师布置的家庭作业，甚至在学校时就主动用同学们玩的时间做家庭作业了！
估计小学生们都会喜欢《雾灵》的。
其实，后现代的作品通常会让我脑子打结，没想到跟儿子一起读下来，竟然这么遛，完全没有以?的异样感。
看哥本哈根气候大会的闹哄哄时，感觉这个会没必要这么开，更有成效的开法，就是给与会代表一人一套《雾灵》，大家一起读，还可以让场外的示威人群同声诵读，三天下来，大家肯定会达成一个不让人类走向灭绝的共识。 -
porcupine12trade:
Gosh I just put in sgd200 worth of books from dangling.com! Coz they take forever to deliver n i din want to wait too long. I tried borrowing Chinese bks fr nlb, but I don't know what bks to search for. The few that I know, found on catalogue n showed avail, but can't b found physically on shelf, quite frustrating.tamarind:
Note that the library also has almost all of the books that I recommended.
Parents can search for the books :
http://www.nlb.gov.sg/
I'll go nlb try my luck again :). Thanks
You can place a reservation for the book that you want at the library, it costs $1.55 per book. Then you can collect at a branch near you.
dangdang.com makes it easy to find good books by listing the best sellers, and we can also read many customer reviews about each book. I usually buy those books with hundreds of good reviews. For some books without reviews, I will try to borrow from the library to read and see if it is good before buying it. -
Hi Tamarind, agree that reading comics is ok if purely for enjoyment and to show kids who dislike Chinese that Chinese books can be fun too.
Just wanted to highlight that comics alone won't work for developing a better grasp of Chinese language.
I've found the book list in your blog to be very useful, especially for my DD. Will check out the 雾灵三部曲（全3册) and see if can interest her to read. Besides reading, I've also introduced songs like 民歌/新谣 (eg. 童年，光阴的故事，排排坐 etc) and brought DD to musicals like 雨季 (but expensive ... )tamarind:
MyBaby,MyBaby:
For comics for older kids, you might wish to consider the series by 翁添保。 Some of his books are 这一班日记 (books 1 and 2), 乐在其中，一本正经漫画之家在新加坡。But this series of comics are more like comic strips , whereas in 多啦A梦 each chapter surrounds one adventure/escapade.
However, just to digress abit, I am not sure about the use of comics to get kids to read or be interested in Chinese.
For me, the purpose of reading is to get children to pick up (though informally, that is, not direct teaching, otherwise reading would not be a pleasure acitivity) vocabulary, sentence structures, writing styles, and of course, other \"hidden\" things like morals, values and culture.
If the objectives of getting children to read Chinese is to expose them to good language and vocabulary, then comics might not be able to serve this objective well as the language tend to be truncated and alot of things need not be addressed in the written text as they can be conveyed via the illustrations/drawings.
Reluctant readers might be more willing to pick up a comic book as comics migth be more accessible (less daunting than picking up a \"proper\" storybook) and attractive (with the pictures and colours) to them. However, I am not sure whether these reluctant readers will progress beyond comics to read storybooks.
I advocate starting with storybooks and when they are reading to a certain extent, to let them read comics as a different type of genre (other genres are storybooks, information books, magazines, newspapers, brochures etc).
Reading Chinese comics is purely for enjoyment. It is for the purpose of showing kids who hate Chinese that they can find fun and laughter in Chinese books. For these reluctant readers, parents should read the comics with them, and then slowly introduce story books to them. So long as parents guide them along the way, they should be able to progress to long novels.
Besides comics, parents can should let your kids read the long list of excellent picture books in my blog.
http://tamarindvillage.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-to-raise-bilingual-child.html
However, P5 kids may find some of these picture books to \"baby-ish\" for them, even though they may not even be able to read them independently. I feel that comic books like the Doraemon series has more complicated plots and are easier for them to read.
I think that comic books are an excellent way of learning oral Chinese, because all the text are conversations. In fact, I learned almost all my spoken mandarin from reading the Doraemon series because I did not grow up in a mandarin speaking family.
I totally agree with you that in order to write good compositions, kids must certainly read tons of story books besides comics. Reading comics alone is not going to help kids get 90+ marks in Chinese.
I also want to recommend this very interesting series of books :
雾灵三部曲（全3册
http://product.dangdang.com/product.aspx?product_id=20692397
It is part comics, and part novel. The 1st chapter is comics, the 2nd chapter is novel, the 3rd chapter is comics, the 4th chapter is novel and so on. The plot is about far in the future when humans are extinct and animals can talk, complicated enough to keep any child interested. However, the Chinese text is not easy to read for our average P5 kids, parental guidance is necessary.
I think that the most important thing to do is to instill a love for Chinese in kids. The best way to do this is to find books with content that will interest them. Then they will be motivated to learn the language in order to read the book. The following customer review from dangdang, for the books 雾灵三部曲, is a good example :
看当当推荐得厉害，所以买了这套书。
没想到儿子如此喜欢！
他6岁，新晋绿领巾，正在学习“我是小学生”一类的语文，大概认识了200个字啦，以前的故事都是我读他听，而这本可是我们共同读的。为了能读这本书，他一点都不拖拉地完成老师布置的家庭作业，甚至在学校时就主动用同学们玩的时间做家庭作业了！
估计小学生们都会喜欢《雾灵》的。
其实，后现代的作品通常会让我脑子打结，没想到跟儿子一起读下来，竟然这么遛，完全没有以?的异样感。
看哥本哈根气候大会的闹哄哄时，感觉这个会没必要这么开，更有成效的开法，就是给与会代表一人一套《雾灵》，大家一起读，还可以让场外的示威人群同声诵读，三天下来，大家肯定会达成一个不让人类走向灭绝的共识。 -
tamarind:
I don't have the habit of reserving books as my kids only borrow eng books, there are so many choices, if unavailable, we'll look for something else or wait. For books tt I find can pass down I'll buy. But the library is really great :).
You can place a reservation for the book that you want at the library, it costs $1.55 per book. Then you can collect at a branch near you.
dangdang.com makes it easy to find good books by listing the best sellers, and we can also read many customer reviews about each book. I usually buy those books with hundreds of good reviews. For some books without reviews, I will try to borrow from the library to read and see if it is good before buying it.
Actually I meant I can't find the books physically on shelf when the catalogue
says bk is avail. I find it frustrating. Today I borrowed 14只老鼠 (I find the
words v tiny, good thing I did not order this) 和 魔法小公主莉莉(I ordered this series fr dangdang). Quick fingers to order, too excited n did not think of lib! I always look to lib for eng bk but don't know y I forgot Abt it when it comes to Chinese books. Abit regret being so 冲动。ordered so many books from dangdang, all r ur reco, hope I can use them long enough to justify the buy :D. Like u say, Shld borrow from library to see if kids like them first. -
porcupine12trade:
I often encountered the same problem of not finding the books on shelf too. The only way is to place a reservation, then the librarian will search high and low for you. Otherwise they will get it from another branch.
I don't have the habit of reserving books as my kids only borrow eng books, there are so many choices, if unavailable, we'll look for something else or wait. For books tt I find can pass down I'll buy. But the library is really great :).tamarind:
You can place a reservation for the book that you want at the library, it costs $1.55 per book. Then you can collect at a branch near you.
dangdang.com makes it easy to find good books by listing the best sellers, and we can also read many customer reviews about each book. I usually buy those books with hundreds of good reviews. For some books without reviews, I will try to borrow from the library to read and see if it is good before buying it.
Actually I meant I can't find the books physically on shelf when the catalogue
says bk is avail. I find it frustrating. Today I borrowed 14只老鼠 (I find the
words v tiny, good thing I did not order this) 和 魔法小公主莉莉(I ordered this series fr dangdang). Quick fingers to order, too excited n did not think of lib! I always look to lib for eng bk but don't know y I forgot Abt it when it comes to Chinese books. Abit regret being so 冲动。ordered so many books from dangdang, all r ur reco, hope I can use them long enough to justify the buy :D. Like u say, Shld borrow from library to see if kids like them first.
Also, try to spend some time reading the books together with your kids. Most kids may just give up once they see so many Chinese words in a book
Actually I love 14只老鼠 for the beautiful illustrations, personally I think one of the joy of reading is looking at pictures. This is especially important for kids because they don't like to be told that they must be learning new words all the time. Pictures are essential for kids to understand what they are reading. Otherwise kids may be able to read many words, but they don't know how to use the words.
I also did not like the pictures in 鸡蛋哥哥 and 永远永远爱你, but my boy loves these books very much and he has read them many times. So kids really think differently from adults.
In fact, for 笑猫日记, at first I did not think it is very good because I just quickly scanned through. But after I asked my girl to read every word out loud to me, I realized kids find these books are interesting because the writing style is humorous, the characters are well defined, the author writes about things that matter to kids. -
porcupine12trade:
I find it very frustrating to find chinese books in the library. If I have nothing in mind, browsing to sift out gems is near impossible. most of them have very thin pages and the words are 密密麻麻. if there is something specific, the cataloging (to me) is also quite inexplicable.
I don't have the habit of reserving books as my kids only borrow eng books, there are so many choices, if unavailable, we'll look for something else or wait. For books tt I find can pass down I'll buy. But the library is really great :).tamarind:
You can place a reservation for the book that you want at the library, it costs $1.55 per book. Then you can collect at a branch near you.
dangdang.com makes it easy to find good books by listing the best sellers, and we can also read many customer reviews about each book. I usually buy those books with hundreds of good reviews. For some books without reviews, I will try to borrow from the library to read and see if it is good before buying it.
Actually I meant I can't find the books physically on shelf when the catalogue
says bk is avail. I find it frustrating. Today I borrowed 14只老鼠 (I find the
words v tiny, good thing I did not order this) 和 魔法小公主莉莉(I ordered this series fr dangdang). Quick fingers to order, too excited n did not think of lib! I always look to lib for eng bk but don't know y I forgot Abt it when it comes to Chinese books. Abit regret being so 冲动。ordered so many books from dangdang, all r ur reco, hope I can use them long enough to justify the buy :D. Like u say, Shld borrow from library to see if kids like them first.
so for those that are 'keepers', should just buy direct from dangdang. or through one of those motherhood forum sprees that are always ongoing. If you buy more than 100 sgd, the shipping can be capped at 20% of book price, which is a good deal. can PM me if you want more info, I don't organise but have participated in a few.
however, whether you buy direct or through a spree, the shipping time is abt 6-8 weeks, and the problem will always be, that if there are any defects (happened to me with sticker books), there will be no refund because the refund period is much shorter than that.
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agree with you toddles. i seldom select the chinese books in the library for dd. they just do not come across as interesting to me. most r in quite bad shape as well, so does not help enhance the chinese reading experience.
anyway, have gotten my si wu kuai du and now reading the note to parents. wah, realised reading a few pages also take me quite a while. first book looks pretty simple leh, so i hope to breeze thru it soon with dd.
tks for the tip on the sgmotherhood sprees -
toddles:
toddles,
however, whether you buy direct or through a spree, the shipping time is abt 6-8 weeks, and the problem will always be, that if there are any defects (happened to me with sticker books), there will be no refund because the refund period is much shorter than that.
If you buy direct from dangdang.com, you can definitely get a refund for the cost of the book, I have done so successfully before. If you buy from sprees, by right it can also be done, but the spree organizers are not willing to do it for you because it is too troublesome.
foreverj,
For library books, what I hated most is to find books that are torn, or have drawings in the pages by inconsiderate kids. I would rather buy new ones, then re-sell them when my kids have finished reading them and don't want them anymore
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MyBaby:
Songs are excellent for learning Chinese. Why did you find those CDs ? I cannot seem to find them in shops any more.
I've found the book list in your blog to be very useful, especially for my DD. Will check out the 雾灵三部曲（全3册) and see if can interest her to read. Besides reading, I've also introduced songs like 民歌/新谣 (eg. 童年，光阴的故事，排排坐 etc) and brought DD to musicals like 雨季 (but expensive ... )
Also, if a child loves a story book in English, parents can also try to find the same book translated into Chinese for him. He may be interested to read the same book again in Chinese. dangdang.com has tons of books translated into Chinese from other languages.
I read that the top PSLE scholar last year, likes to read both English and Chinese version of the same book
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