Top 4 Reasons for Babies and Toddlers to Learn Mandarin Chinese
Updated: Feb 8
1. Bain Development
Our number one reason is brain development. There may be no better way to development skills across the learning spectrum than Mandarin classes. Mandarin is different from other languages in a few key ways:
It's a tonal language which means musically-minded families will recognize the advantages of our little ones accurately deciphering pitch and tone. There is a strong correlation with fluency in a tonal language and developing perfect pitch (University of California in San Diego). Mandarin has 5 tones (or 4 and a neutral tone), a long flat tone, a rising tone, a dipped tone, a dropping tone and a neutral tone and these help indicate the meaning of a character when spoken.
Writing in Mandarin is done in characters. There are thousands of characters to learn but a pattern emerges through learning the radials. Learning and practicing writing leads to better pattern recognition.
Because it's a tonal language with a character-based writing system learning and speaking Mandarin activates different parts of the brain.
MATH! Counting to big numbers in Mandarin is really easy. Once they have learn 1-10 they can count to 99. Add one more number and they can count to 999. One more - 9,999. One more - 999,999,999! It's all quite logical: For example 12 is 10 + 2 十二 (shí èr) and 40 is 4 + 10 四十 (sì shí). It’s also easy to remember days of the week and months, and they are just a word of week or month with a number, for example, January is ‘one-month’ 一月 (yī yuè).
Art and Fine Motor Skills
Chinese characters are made up of multiple components that fit together to create meaning and some of the pronunciation. As children will mostly be learning pictographs and characters that have clearer visual meaning, characters become mini pictures. For instance, animals such as 羊 (yáng), 牛 (niú) and 马 (mǎ) make it easy to image real animals. More complex characters, such as the one for cat 猫 (māo) shows an animal on the left side combined with a field 田 (tián) and the grass radical 艹 (cǎo). These two characters combined actually provide the pronunciation ‘miáo – māo’ to the character, but these components also allow the creation of a story.
This can make learning characters a lot more fun and easier for children to both remember the characters by creating stories and writing by constructing pictures for each one. Children are full of creative and imaginative games, and creating mnemonics will be a cinch for them! While most Western languages are written in one direction, the act of writing Mandarin characters requires brush or pen strokes in multiple directions, with differentiating hand pressure. Writing in this way has been shown to improve fine motor skills and spatial recognition in children.
It's Fun! We promise:)
Many of our teachers are non-native speakers and fell in love with learning Mandarin. They can attest that mastering a word, a chapter, a dialogue, and being able to actively recall your vocabulary until reaching fluency is an absolute joy. Gamification has become a model to help learn anything, especially a language. There are many language learning platforms that have made learning ‘more fun’ by creating a game-element to the learning process.
We also love games and our students do as well. We often take games the children already know how to play and turn them into language lessons: Uno, Guess Who, Chutes & Ladders, and Monopoly have all become great ways to learn!
Opportunities in the Future
We fully endorse this idea and now that we have taught for 10+ years we have seen the results first-hand. Several of the students from our first after school program continued studying Mandarin through college and are now using their language skills in professions ranging from think-tanks to teaching to finance and travel. This may be an obvious one, but if kids start learning Chinese, it will undoubtedly open doors for the future, not just for their careers but also to communicate and socialize with their peers. Over 1.2 billion people speak Chinese worldwide and Chinese-learning classes have increased by 51% since 2002. It’s already clear that China is a massive presence in the business world speaking Chinese will only become a bigger advantage for the next generation of learners.
Amazingly, almost 20% of the world’s population speaks some variety of Chinese language, with over one billion people speaking Mandarin. That’s a big chunk of the world! In fact, it’s either the most-spoken or second-most spoken depending on whether you count Chinese languages together or specifically Mandarin. English also has over one billion speakers worldwide, which means that English-speaking kids who learn Mandarin will be able to communicate with almost half of the world’s population.