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Learn More About Lei's Experience:

Chinese Learning a foreign language can make a person smater,besides other benefits. In this regard, Chinese language is particularly effective, as Chinese characters are like pictures and we know that the right brain process picture information. When you learn Chinese, your right brain thus get stimulated, just like music and arts. When learn Chinese, we should take advantage of two unique features of Chinese language: very simple grammer rules and relatively small vocabulary. It only requires ~2500 characters to understand newspapers and story books. People think Chinese is difficult to learn, probably because the characters are too difficult to write. But in this computer age, we don't have to handwrite Chinese characters, as long as we can recognize them and input them into a computer. Another thing I don't like about the Chinese Schools here is that their method is too slow in teaching those Chinese characters. With their approach, it takes a student 7 years (kinder to 6th grade) to master the ~2500 characters. A student in their system won't start autonomous reading before 4th grade. I have been following an accelerated approach when teaching my two boys. Only after 9 months, my older boy (six and half) has already got ~1000 vocabulary and is reading to himself stories written in Chinese. In addition, I have accumulated a great amount of multi-media Chinese studying materials including songs, Flash stories and electronic games. To promote the interest of little kids, I have also figured out a wide array of fun activities and games that can be used in the lessons. I admit that I was not majored in Chinese language or education when I was in college. But I always love to read and write well. In fact I got a 2nd place in a big writing contest participated by over 1000 high school students. I also got the "Best Young Teacher of Beijing Medical University" award in 1993.