Recently, I received a message, about Online Chinese Class for kids from an American parent, saying that her daughter is 7 years old, and she will have Chinese lessons every weekend.
The child can use Chinese for daily communication at home and knows a lot of Chinese characters.
In order to expand the child’s Chinese vocabulary She bought Chinese books marked with pinyin for her child, but found that her child’s pinyin is not very good, and it is easy for her to make mistakes when encountering unfamiliar characters.
Once, the child encountered the word “can” and saw “càn” marked in pinyin, and directly pronounced it as “can” in English.
Another time when I saw “hèn”, it was also pronounced as “hen” in English. Although the two pronunciations are similar, there are still differences when you carefully distinguish them.
The mother also found that it is more difficult for the daughter to distinguish between “ou” and “uo”, and when encountering “hòu” and “huò”, she does not know which is which.
My mother would like to ask if there is any way to help her daughter learn pinyin well. If she keeps getting confused with English, will giving up pinyin have any effect on learning Chinese.
As native speakers of English, it is normal for Chinese children to be easily confused with English letters, words as well.
When learning Pinyin, because Pinyin is a form of phoneticizing Chinese characters with English letters.
For example, “A” can be pronounced as “ei” or “ɑ:”. After seeing it, it is understandable for children to be unsure which sound to pronounce for a while. Then pinyin is easy to make mistakes, as my mother said, can I just skip it?
After all, Pinyin is just a phonetic system for Chinese characters. The same sound can correspond to many words, and a word can have multiple pronunciations. When you see a pinyin, you can’t be sure which word it is.
Even if you learn it, you can’t spell it like the natural spelling in English Reading is the same, to achieve the effect that you can read the words when you see them, and you can spell them when you hear them.
Moreover, people in ancient times did not have pinyin. Didn’t scholars also learn how to read?
Some children do not learn pinyin, but this will require a higher vocabulary for the children, and in the future learning, it is difficult to determine how to read Chinese characters they do not know.
Even if they look up the dictionary through radicals, but because If you don’t know pinyin, you still can’t know how to read Chinese characters.
Online Chinese Class for kids every time you recognize a character, you need to ask teachers and parents for help. After learning Pinyin, the child can look up the dictionary independently, which is convenient for recognizing characters; it can also help the child increase the amount of reading. In the primary stage of Chinese, many books contain Pinyin.
After the child learns Pinyin, he can also read picture books alone, it can help improve their vocabulary.
Therefore, parents who want their children to learn pinyin but are hesitant can try to let their children learn pinyin.
In order to help children learn pinyin better, the teacher introduces three ways to learn pinyin well.
By practicing anytime and anywhere, it will naturally be different from English if you practice more.
For children who are just beginning to learn, when practicing pinyin pronunciation, you can find out which initials and finals are the same or similar to English pronunciation, and find a good pair, so that getting started will be very simple.
For example, the pronunciation of the initials “b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, k, h” in Pinyin is the same as that of English consonants, so no special memory is required; another example is the sound “g” in There is a pronunciation [g] in English that is the same as Pinyin, and the same pronunciation can be used to assist in memorizing Pinyin.
Then pick out the pinyin with special pronunciation, such as “j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, z, c” and “ü”.
Such as individual pinyin with special pronunciation, memorize it separately, and the pronunciation of pinyin is basically no problem .
For children of this age, learning pinyin by playing games will make the practice more effective.
In the game of finding friends, write the initials and finals on different cards, and the mother reads a pinyin “guò” to let the children find the corresponding cards.
See if you can form pinyin, and then read it out, and compare who has formed more pinyin, so that in the process of playing games, children can understand the pronunciation of initials and finals more clearly, as well as the composition of pinyin.
Mothers can usually find some Chinese versions of English nursery rhymes for children, such as the song “Little Star”.
The melody is familiar to children, but the Chinese lyrics are changable.
You can sing and find the joy of learning pinyin from music.
In a similar way, you can also find some catchy tongue twisters, such as “eight hundred pacesetters rushing to the north slope”, which can strengthen children’s memory of the confusing “b” and “p”.
After practicing a few more times, record the tongue twisters she said, and then listen to them yourself.
It is easy to find the Online Chinese Class for kids you overlooked when speaking, so that the pronunciation will gradually become more and more accurate. After learning, you can also let others Kids can try it too, it’s a lot of fun.
In short, learning Pinyin is not difficult. Children tend to confuse it with English mainly because they don’t practice enough. Parents don’t have to worry too much.
If there is confusion in pronunciation, parents can correct it at any time.
At the same time, through the three methods introduced to you just now, parents can practice more with their children at home. After laying the foundation of Online Chinese Class for kids, it is no problem for children to correctly distinguish between pinyin and English.