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 learned 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 learned 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.