Hao Mama 好妈妈

As a follow-up to the post about the iPhone app for teaching characters to children, I have a quick story. As L was practicing writing his Chinese numbers for his Mandarin immersion summer camp homework, he proudly showed me that he knows the correct stroke order for each of them. I asked if his teacher had taught him that, and he said, “No, I learned it from your phone.” So the app works (and he loves it). They just need to add more characters; there are only a handful and they are a bit randomly selected (tang 汤, soup, is a useful vocab word but is a complicated character that maybe doesn’t need to be in the first dozen learned).

On a marginally related note, I read a great op-ed in the New York Times yesterday, by child development expert Alison Gopnik, about how children learn and the importance of play. We sent L to a two-week session of Mandarin immersion camp at his school, which overall was a big success. But as great as it is to have a child who is so excited about learning characters and Chinese in general, I felt a little uncomfortable sending him to a camp that was so academically intensive. He learned a lot and had fun, but my idea of summer is play, play, play, ice cream, more play. The point of the Times article, which I found refreshing and true, is that young children learn best through free-form play because they naturally challenge themselves to seek out new experiences and knowledge, without needing fancy toys and DVDs to do it for them. The last paragraph of the article says it all:

But what children observe most closely, explore most obsessively and imagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play.

While the summer camps and all the many Chinese teaching props out there are crucial and valuable, our kids have always learned the most Chinese through conversations with their father, games they play at school, songs they enjoy listening to, teachers or caretakers they feel close to, and books they love reading over and over. Flashcards can only go so far. Kids need to play.

I just read about a new book which gives foreigners learning Chinese an innovative way to remember tones, which for many people (including me) is the most challenging part of the language. The book, Chinese Through Tone & Color by Nathan Dummitt, is based on a system he created while he himself was studying Chinese. Read an interview with Dummitt here, and a critique of the book by a fellow linguist.

This website provides lots of resources for learning Chinese characters, including virtual flashcards, an English-Chinese dictionary and translation service, a character memory game, and coolest of all, animations showing stroke order for any character. Great help for kids who are in the tedious process of copying, and copying, and copying characters.

We don’t have a lot of cartoon-themed toys or clothes or other paraphernalia in our house; We don’t have a TV so, with a few exceptions, my children don’t recognize most of the popular characters anyway so it’s not really an issue. (Now, if Pixar were to produce a decent blockbuster based on the Monkey King, it might be a different story…) But that all changed this summer, when Xi Yang Yang (ie “Happy Sheep”) entered our lives. A Chinese friend and an uncle both gave our kids DVDs, comic books (the full set of 20+), action figures, keychains, etc etc of “Happy Sheep and the Big Bad Wolf,” China’s hottest animated series. They are really pretty ridiculous looking, the animation isn’t even good, and the storyline is a silly, Wile E. Coyote-Road Runner type cartoon about a group of sheep who are always trying to fend off the latest attacks by the evil but incompetent Big Bad Wolf. The violence is of the Acme explosives variety, yet, from what I can tell, without the creativity or cleverness of Chuck Jones’ characters. (I have to admit I haven’t watched much yet, and my husband says some of the stories are pretty entertaining.) But my kids are hooked. Even little T toddles around the house asking for “Yang Yang, Yang Yang!”. The full line of Xi Yang Yang products can be found on this site and the Wikipedia entry introduces all the characters. The series even has its own Facebook page. Scroll to the bottom of this post for clips of the animated series via YouTube.

China promoted the cartoon as a local product to compete globally with Kung Fu Panda. The fact that you have never heard of it means that they weren’t too successful. (They could start by improving the official English translation of the name, “Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf.”) But it has apparently caught on in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and in our home. As L sits down to watch another episode, I have to remember, it’s good language practice…

Meanwhile, other American cartoons are a hit in China, especially Spongebob Squarepants (“Haimianbaobao”), who now has his own Chinese-language website. I also noticed on my last trip to Target that the PBS series Ni Hao Kai-lan, about the adventures of a Chinese-American girl, has its own line of merchandise. I wonder if Kai-lan will ever have the same mass appeal as Dora and Diego, her Spanish-speaking equivalents.

Clips of Xi Yang Yang (many more are available on YouTube by searching 喜羊羊与灰太狼):