For More Details – Read post ‘Reading PCR with Darius- Book 1‘

When he started reading the key words in Book 1 after three weeks, I introduced Book 2 to him concurrently so we could have something more to read because Book 1 was a little short to last through the entire dinner.

Book 2 contents -  uses ‘明明’, ‘丽丽’ as the main characters and builds on to the vocabulary already learnt, e.g. ‘大’ (big)  ‘红花‘. Introduced colour words like ‘红’ (red) and ‘白’ (white). Introduced descriptive words like, ‘美丽’. Since ‘丽’ was already learnt, he only needed to learn a new word, ‘美’ (mei). Also introduced a new object ‘蝴蝶’ (butterfly).

Process of Reading was:

1. Read the entire book through for a few times.
2. When he started sounding out the words when I had not yet read them, I’ll leave out those words for him to read when we come across them again in other pages of the book or for the next reading.
3. When he starts to say more words, I start to leave out more or ask him directly what those key words are.
4. I’ll point to the pictures after pointing to the key words to direct his focus and let him understand what the words mean.
5. When he has more or less sounded out all the key words and we are still reading the book for revision, I’ll start asking him questions so he can answer and speak those key words. E.g. “这是什么花? 什么颜色的花？” (What colour is the flower?) He responds, “红花” (red flower) “这是谁？” (Who is this?) for asking about 明明 and 丽丽. “这是什么？” (What is this?) Since 什么 is also one of the key words to learn in the story, it helped to ask these questions so he can understand the usage.
6. This questioning and answering helped to make him understand the story and the words so it won’t be just pure memorisation.
7. I also try pointing out real flowers to him while walking and saying, “Dar, 看! 花!” When we see things in white or red which are often vehicles, I’ll tell him “white car”, “白车”. So far, we still haven’t seen a real butterfly for me to point out to him. I’ll also try to use “这是什么?” sometimes while asking him questions.

His progress details:
1. Again, with every new book, he didn’t take to it immediately. No matter how many times I told him ‘花’，he refused to repeat after me and insisted on telling me, “Flower! Flower!” Only after many readings for about a week, he started saying 花 (“hua”) when we looked at the title page and subsequently started reading out “看花”. He said it in a cute funny way though. You will hear it later in the video below.

2. He still read most of the words with an English tone and is not able to pronounce the ‘l’ sound for ‘li’ but it’s alright. Will surely improve when he starts speaking more.

3. The connecting words in a sentence like, 这，是，说 are harder for him to grasp and that’s alright for his age. Right now, I’m happy he is able to understand and speak the main key words.

4. He was able to read ‘红’ after a week but it sounded funny with a low tone instead of a high chirpy tone. He is still not able to read ‘白’ well.

5. One funny thing was, the story had 丽丽 wearing the flower in her head and the word beside her was ‘美丽’, meaning ‘pretty’. BUT he doesn’t get what pretty means and it was hard to describe for him an adjective. Hence, he interpreted the word himself, laughing at the picture, going ‘hahaha’ everytime we come to the page. He thought the girl was laughing, ‘hahaha’ which was what he learnt earlier in Book 1 （笑了）. I still do not know how to correct him and describe ‘pretty’ to him.

He does not understand what 'pretty' is

6. Sometimes, if I cannot get him to understand the chinese words, I will throw in its English equivalent because he already knows what the English word means. This is useful for me since he wouldn’t get what I’m saying and this is an easy way out. However, I think I used the wrong method as we should refrain from using English to explain or he’d keep relying on English. Everytime when I read ‘什么’, I will put my hands out in a questioning way and say, “What?” after I said it in Chinese. He grew to say “What?” (cos he already knew this word) everytime we come to the page. Now you know why I said it’s better to refrain from using English to teach. If given choices, he would rather speak English although he understood the meaning (refer to Point 1).

7. Finally, after about a month of reading this, he started saying, “蝴蝶”! That, to me, is a very difficult word to learn but he pronounced it well, though not with a correct tone. What I’m surprised though is that he had finally started having some differences in tones instead of the same monotones like in English. He would say this word as “Hu” (third tone), “Die” (second tone) when the two words are supposed to be both in second tones. And when this word appeared in another storybook, he was able to recognise it and told me, ‘hu…dieeee!’ And funnily, he started saying this word too when he is reading an English storybook with the word ‘Butterfly’ in it. He still could not say ‘Butterfly’ and says it as ‘fly’ no matter how many times I said it for him.

8. It’s a great improvement that he could speak in other tones. It shows that he is starting to ‘get’ how Mandarin sounds like and hopefully, he will sound less ‘ang-mo-ish’ as he improves.

This is The Video of How He Reads the Book 2 – ‘看花’
Recorded on the 30th of August- two weeks ago

For the purpose of this recording, I was asking him to specially read out words that he already knew in several of the sentences. But usually, I’ll just read over the words he already knows and get him to pronounce more of the words he is unsure of, by waiting for him or asking him questions.

We started reading Book 4 this week about Drawing even though he doesn’t yet know all the connecting words and some key words. He wanted something fresh.

Up next: Reading Book 3

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