Hi! I wanted to ask if anyone here had any experience in helping their kids learn Manderin. My kiddo is only 3 1/2 months old ol but I have been planning on getting them some books to get going for the first few years, and try to keep it up. I do want to home school as much as my life will allow.

Full disclosure I don’t know almost Manderin, besides a productive bout with Duolingo, which I wouldn’t recommend…

  • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    10·
    2 months ago

    Listening (including decoding signs) is developmentally primary for first-language acquisition. If you are trying to teach a language to a baby, starting with books or trying to get there mainly with books is silly.

    Exposing them to the script is fine of course, but the most important part is that they hear the language being used in meaningful contexts where they can associate what is said to the situation. If you are serious about them learning Mandarin, you should start on that now.

  • bobs_guns@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    10·
    2 months ago

    How is your kid gonna read the books if they don’t even know the language? Are you going to read it to them?

      • bobs_guns@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        8·
        2 months ago

        well reading is only a small part of learning the language, it’s probably more important for a 3.5 month old to focus more on listening and speaking, you can focus more on stuff like video to get them started. i’d suggest something like little fox which associates images with sounds. you definitely don’t want to focus on translation from chinese to english at all, but i find right now that flashcards that require me to construct some kind of sentence in chinese helps quite a bit, but i am also older than 30 and i have study skills that i didn’t have when i was less than 1