A first Mandarin course for children aged four to six. Twenty-six starting characters as flip cards, the four tones, numbers to twenty, colours, shapes, eighty first words and the things we say every day — then seven picture games to play. A Chinese voice reads every card aloud and the Khmer meaning sits underneath, so a child can use it before they can read a single character.
Mandarin at this age is not a smaller version of the adult course. Two things are different from English and they decide the whole order below: the tone is part of the word, and the character is not a spelling of the sound. Get those two right and everything else follows.
妈 mā, 麻 má, 马 mǎ, 骂 mà are four different words. A child who learns a word without its tone has learnt it wrong, and it is far harder to correct later than to get right now. Four- to six-year-olds copy pitch better than adults ever will — this is the one thing that is genuinely easier young.
你好, 谢谢, answering 你叫什么名字?, short sentences such as 我喜欢芒果, and songs. As in any language this carries the most weight — and in Mandarin it is also how the tones get in.
In themes: family, body, animals, food, classroom, clothes, weather, colours, numbers and action words. Fewer words than an English course of the same length, because each one also carries a tone to hold on to.
Twenty to forty characters in a year is a good target, and the pictographic ones come first because a child can see the thing in them: 山 is a mountain, 口 an open mouth, 日 the sun. Recognising a character is the goal; writing it comes later.
Pinyin is a ladder for adults. A child who leans on it stops looking at the characters and ends up reading Latin letters with Khmer sound values. Print it, use it yourself, and do not ask a five-year-old to read it.
Five to ten minutes on one activity, then change. Two or three characters a week, one word group a week. Twenty short minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday — and say every new word aloud, because a tone cannot be learnt silently.
A browser voice can say a word, but it cannot tell a child their tone was wrong. Our tutors teach Mandarin from the first character upwards — at home, at our office or online, in Khmer or English.