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
It's Fun! We promise:)
Opportunities in the Future