Learning Mandarin Chinese as a child is far easier than as an adult. Children young enough can become bi-lingual with ease, even if the languages are very different as are Chinese and Enlgish. Young children learn easily through imitation. Even babies are known to be able to differentiate languages as they have different sounds. Chinese has a sing-song sound.

Context matters to children learning two languages. If your child is learning languages such as Chinese young, try to associate different languages with, for example, certain people or places or occasions.

For the very young dual immersion schools exist but are not plentiful. Children might be confused in the first few weeks but quickly adapt and learn.

For the young there can be pre-school clubs but children need more than an hour plus teaching a week. Practice online can be helpful to reduce the overall cost and to expose the child to sufficient Chinese. See our new practice playground Mandarama. Mandarama is a good value way of helping your child make progress and stay enthused about Chinese.

Schools increasingly are adopting Mandarin Chinese before Secondary and High School. Before the so called window of opportunity closes between 11 and 13, children are not worried by a language being different as they have the cognitive flexibility to accommodate this variety.

Young enough and you need not point out the differences between Chinese and English just as you do not teach grammar to a baby. It can be advantageous for general literacy to learn about these differences at a later stage. The child learns that languages are tools that work in different ways to transmit meaning. Mandarama is built upon this concept along with incremental vocab, contextualised phrases, and interactive cultural content.

Learn Chinese as an older child, over 13 years of age, and children struggle to become fluent, to cope with Chinese characters and to speak without an accent if they begin to learn Chinese.

If you would like to know more about learning languages as a child, especially Mandarin Chinese contact us with your questions.

Resources

Multilingual Children’s Association
http://www.multilingualchildren.org/