Saturday, March 7, 2009

Preschool Chinese: Reviewing 火星娃识汉字

I've been looking for an interesting way to get Rebecca to recognise more Chinese words. Most educators I've talked to agree that word recognition is very possible for a young child since Chinese characters look very much like pictures, and does not operate in the same phonetic way that English words do. We do have some Chinese flashcards that I really need to ressurect and organise a way to get myself be more disciplined in doing them with her.

I came across a very active Chinese parenting forum and one poster recommended this DVD series called 火星娃识汉字 (Alien Frog Recognises Chinese Words - literal translation). I went onto Youtube to search for it, nothing. I was a little dissappointed until I recalled one of the researches that a team member had worked on called Tudou.com, which is a Chinese equivalent to Youtube. I did a search there on this series and found a slew of clips.

I happily downloaded 2 sessions and watched them with Rebecca and Mr B. Mr B and I had a good laugh on some of the characters as they seem to be cartoon illustrations of typical Chinese elders from ancient Kungfu series. Some of story plots were also quite funny and there was a purple grape-looking character with red hair and a drippy nose who seemed to be doing a lot of word presentation.

These two sessions seemed to help Rebecca a little. She was quite happy to recite the words as they were presented and surprised Mr B and I when she cited two words independently. A fluke? We're not sure but pleasantly pleased none the less.

Some things that did bother us about this series after watching 2 episodes include:
  • reference to swords, guns which we've been trying to teach R to stay away from
  • use of phrases like stupid (笨蛋)
  • average first 10-12 minutes of each 22 minute session was spent on a story type of storyline and is rather longwinded (we got bored, R just watched), only the last 10 minutes or so were spent on introducing the characters

Some things that we did like include:

  • 52 episodes, seems rather complete
  • R seemed to respond well to the presentation
  • Showed how the Chinese characters evolved pictorially

The series is quite cheap though, its only RMB130 for a set from Dangdang.com

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Found this to be pretty interesting, but can't seem to locate the originals anywhere: 动画识字 series.

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