Topic reviewed : Chinese language basics

As for the approaches, it will be better to state which approach you will be focusing on mainly, since there are three approaches, not having one main approach could be confusing to what step approach the learning design is leading to. For me personally I would prefer having a strong single approach to scale my process and go dig deep into it. However, I really like and appreciate how you can come up with so many different types of approaches and integrate it into the learning method to help they learn a new language.

I really liked the rationale as it provided the basic to a strong fundamentals to the Chinese characters and symbols, however, I think it would’ve been way better if the activities have more variety rather than just competitions, for example, tell two people to act in character and chat using simple Chinese greetings, it gives more colorful experiences into the learning program and makes it less boring while maintaining its instructiveness.

I really like how you guys are catchy with every details of the fundamentals, making student imitating after teacher and not letting any part of the basic to be lost to ensure student have strong base and that will help them in the future. And as a native Chinese speaker myself, I appreciate that very much since I know the importance of learning the fundamentals in Chinese, everything is confusing if you don’t learn the fundamentals well.

as for the interactive learning resource, I personally don’t think it is needed to include the origins of Chinese since the ancient Chinese is so vastly different from the modern Chinese we have now, as a native Chinese speaker, learning old Chinese got me confusing, not to mention that these are the people that don’t even speak modern Chinese, therefore seeing ancient Chinese to them is probably no use, and if not it might confuse them a bit as well. Therefore, I would say just focus on the version we have now, and let them fully get used to it, if they are interested in how the history of Chinese has changed upon, they can go deep into it in the future.

I like how from topic 1 to 4 there is a great build up from the fundamental to the hard ones, making them learn step by step like building a building blocks. You guys have really done a good job of getting the fundamentals right for the learners.

and I love how you made them identify the differences between pinyin and grammar, so basically letting them to know pinyin basic first and tell them to write an essay to show how it works that makes them different from English to get used to the Chinese pinyin system, this is a really good idea since they are really confusing and its very important to know the difference between the two systems.

And you are telling them to write after all of that which really is nice since you got all the potential confusing factors sorted out.

However, I would say try to not be too repetitive and add more diverse factors into the topics since even though the fundamentals have stacked up and potential confusions are erased out, it can be too boring to just keep focusing on the writing and imitation of the characters, try to add more diversities into it instead of just focusing on the writing, things that can help them understand but not limited to only writing.

overall I really like the planning you guys put up with, giving clear distinction of when to learn what and a really good framework to learn from the fundamentals of Chinese pinyin to writing the Chinese language while helping them to identify the difference between Chinese pinyin characters and English. However it would really be a lot better if there were more diversities and co-oporation with one and another instead of just writing and reading.