Early Start Chinese 1 (Traditional Chinese) (Volume 1) (Chinese Edition) Paperback – September 28, 2018

Are you tired of persuading or 'forcing' your kid to go to Chinese school or to do any Chinese writing practice at home? This Chinese activity book is the answer to no-cry Chinese homeschooling. My daughter is only 3 years old and we spend 10 min every evening to do a few pages before bed time. Out of so many Chinese teaching materials out there, this is the only one which has a lot of fun activities for every word/lesson and for my daughter it doesn't feel like studying at all. She calls it "coloring Chinese." It's how much fun for her to learn with this book. I also like the order of the lessons in this book. The book starts with some popular words so that after learning a few lessons, my daughter is able to read a complete sentence. It boosts her confident in reading a lot. Learning a language should be fun but not another chore we parents ask our kids to do. My daughter is almost done with volume 1 and I'm definitely getting her the next one.

Each lesson introduces one new character, 25 total over the whole book. There is room to practice writing (with stroke order guidance) only once, so if your goal is to help your child learn to write, there is not nearly enough repetition. You could scan/duplicate the word and make your own worksheet if you want your child to practice writing more. Each lesson also includes a few simple games/puzzles to help reinforce recognition of the character and a reading exercise that uses the current lesson's character along with revisiting the previous ones. Overall it's a very gentle introduction to reading, but not very useful for writing unless you do some extra work.Also on the subject of writing - a character like 愛 (love) may be commonly used, but it's complex as heck for a 3-5 year old to write. Same with 貓 (cat) - why not teach 夠 (dog), which is just as common but much more simple? Still, I will buy the remaining volumes for my son (age 5) as he seems to be interested and doesn't complain (so far) about doing one lesson per day.

This is the same with another practice book. It is good for the kids who had no Chinese at all. My daughter is 7. She had learned Chinese a year, so it is too easy for her. But it is a good fit for my son's level. He is 5.

Great book! I like the author’s approach not to use pinyin and focus on characters instead. The learned vocabulary repeats itself throughout the book making it easier to remember. Definitely recommend. Will be buying the next step!

I like that the book has a good selection of fun activities to make learning Chinese fun. Each lesson is organized by a Chinese character. It's nice that each lesson started with how the character should be written in a specific order followed by games that teach you to recognize the word. However, being a native speaker myself, I've noticed that the order of how the character should be written is wrong on some of them. Not a big deal, in my opinion, but this is an education material and you would think they wouldn't mess up something this basic.

Highly recommend this book - it combines modern and traditional teaching methods, using games for character recognition as opposed to the old school way of forceful memorization.

Love this set! The lesson is building up from one word to a sentence to sentences. It’s also repetitive so kids can remember. Love the exercises as well. I would love if there is pinyin for the “instructions” in addition to the English translation.

I won't recommend this book if you are going to teach your kids with this book. It is expensive with shallow content. It doesn't worth the cost.