The most common question I get from parents is “How can I help my child stop hating Chinese?”.

I know what your child is going through.

I grew up in an English speaking family, and I hated my 12 years of learning Chinese. And I’m not alone: many of my peers hated learning Chinese. Funnily, many of them now ask if we provide adult classes because they regret not being able to use Chinese in a work setting.

I think that’s why so many parents want their children to like, or at least not, hate Chinese.

The simple solution – everyday, read for 5 minutes, revise vocab for 5 minutes.

Before you respond with “my child refuses”, hear me out: we’ve helped thousands of kids transform their Chinese using this method. In fact, I even tested this out on myself over the last two months, and my Chinese reading speed and vocabulary has improved tremendously. 

Read on to find out more.

WHY DOES YOUR CHILD DISLIKE CHINESE?

Assuming your child lives in an English-speaking environment, he or she probably gets very few opportunities to use Chinese outside of school. The only time your child uses Chinese is probably during enrichment class, doing homework or spelling practice.

In Psychology, there’s something known as Classical conditioning or learning through association. Simply put, when a person or animal is linked to two different stimuli at the same time, they will grow to associate the stimuli with each other.

So imagine: if every time your child learns Chinese, it’s doing homework, memorising compo, practising spelling, over time he or she will associate Chinese with these tedious tasks and naturally dislike it.

BREAKING THE LOOP

As parents, we instinctively know this. That’s why many parents send their children to holiday camps during the June and December holidays to rekindle their passion for Chinese.

Holiday camps are a great start because they provide a fun and immersive experience for kids to associate learning Chinese with good vibes. But if your child is in primary school, 2 weeks of fun camps a year isn’t enough to undo 40 weeks of homework, spelling and exams.

If a holiday camp is akin to an annual visit to the dentist, then reading for 5 mins is like brushing your teeth daily. It takes no time at all and if done regularly, goes a long way.

BUT MY CHILD REFUSES TO READ

We covered the importance of reading previously (here and here), but a problem that many parents face is that most primary school children much rather read English books.

So what can we do?

Well, we need to negotiate with our children to get them to be willing to commit just 5 mins a day to read Chinese. If they are older, you can explain that reading will make exams much easier. And promise that it will only take 5 mins, and he or she doesn’t need to finish the book.

Once your child is willing to try, see these three tips to make reading easier.

Tip 1: Choose books that are easy to read

One of the biggest mistakes a learner can make is to choose content that is too difficult – if your child has to check the dictionary or ask you what a word means every sentence, it’s going to be an incredibly frustrating experience.

You might be thinking: “but whenever my child learns a new passage in class, they are always full of hard words. If I find a book with a lot of new words, won’t he or she learn more?” This form of reading is called Intensive Reading and isn’t our goal as it requires a lot of concentration and typically is done in class by a teacher.

Instead, our goal is to provide our children with something easy to read for 5 mins a day, and so it’s more important to find material that is interesting and relatively easy to understand.

I made that mistake two months ago – I was hooked on this Chinese drama called Legend of Fuyao, so I tried to read the web novel. Except that it was too difficult for me and I had to keep checking a dictionary, which was both tiring and demoralising.

Thankfully, I found two other web novels that were easier and equally interesting, making it easy for me to stick to my plan of reading every day. 

Tip 2: Use technology

If your children are young, it’s easy to use colourful picturebooks to get them to read. Preschoolers naturally want to spend time with their parents, and almost all kids love stories, so it was quite easy to encourage reading.

On the other hand, Primary school children are much more independent and tend to insist on reading English books, especially if they find the Chinese stories more boring.

Many parents try to solve this by trying to find more interesting books, but realise the more engaging books are often too difficult for their children. 

We find that the better solution is to use technology to entice children to want to read Chinese stories. Some examples are reader pens or guided readers, but our favourite method is animated stories with read-aloud.

The idea behind animated stories is that the content is engaging to kids while exposing children to a wide range of vocabulary. Even if they don’t fully understand all the words, the combination of animation and read-aloud helps students naturally build up their foundation.

Unlike adults, children learn languages like a sponge, and can easily broaden their Chinese vocabulary just by being exposed to animated stories.

Tip 3: Spend a few mins revising vocab

After your child has gotten into the habit of spending 5 mins reading, a great way to further accelerate learning is to pick out a few keywords from the story and mark it out for revision.

We talked about this in last week’s post on our Comprehension guided reader, where we introduced a three step process.

1. Read a passage
2. Pick out new words to learn
3. Reinforces new words through quizzes.

I’ve been doing this daily for the last 2 months: after I read for 5 minutes, I pick out a few words to add to my flashcard app (I use Anki). Over the last 2 months, I’ve added close to 350 words to my flashcard app, which automatically prompts me to revise 30 words a day (takes ~5 mins).

In just two months, my reading speed has improved nearly 40% from ~200 characters per min (CPM) to 275 CPM, and as my vocabulary noticeably improves, I’m motivated to keep reading.

SUMMARY

The long-term solution to getting good at Chinese is to encourage daily reading and revision. It doesn’t take much time – just 5 mins reading and 5 mins revising of vocab will set your child up for both academic success as well as the ability to use Chinese outside of school.

The start is the hardest and once your child gets in the habit of reading Chinese, it’s easy to continue.

If you aren’t sure of how to begin, KidStartNow has developed over 100 animated books, each with read-aloud, animation and vocabulary quizzes that help students learn through reading. Importantly, these stories are written specifically for Singaporean students, and incorporate words taken from the primary school syllabus.We provide a free 7-day trial, and whatsapp us for more information.