Is multimedia important in Mandarin Course and Mandarin Classes?

According to my experience, multimedia materials are very useful in motivating students and bettering the learning performance. However, the time required for preparing multimedia materials is much longer than general paper textbooks.


One of my friends has been teaching Mandarin in Thailand for two years. He tried almost everything he could includes flash cards, body language, Mandarin-to-Thai translation, candies, and even whips in his Mandarin course and Mandarin classes in the past two years; Nevertheless, none of them did a good work. So he was very frustrated and disappointed about his job there. He asked himself everyday that why he could not attract students’ attention and improve their ability? He thought the problem was his boring teaching style and tried to give up such career in Thailand. Fortunately, the college where he was teaching established a computer and multimedia classroom which greatly enrich his classes.

You may wonder how did he make it? Me too. So I asked him and the answers are as followed,

First, he rearranged the contents of his Mandarin Course syllabus. Actually, he divided it into several smaller and interactive Mandarin Classes.

Second, in each class, he not only engaged and blended the pictures, videos and voices with what he would like to teach, but also interacted with his students by the internet based multimedia learning unit designed by himself.

Third, the students could not only interact with him but also interact with each other. The classroom became a micro social network, students could learn, share, and even teach other students real time.

That was definitely a wonderful and the best experience those students could ever have, therefore, they stuck with the teaching system he created after that. And what even more exciting for him was their learning result which was much better than he had expected.

Now, my friend is very happy and I think he will be more and more happy in the future by blending the multimedia factors into his teaching.

Will learning Mandarin put children off?

I just read an article "Learning Mandarin will put children off" from Times. In the very beginning, I am really nervous about what the author is going to discuss. Because as a Mandarin teacher, if there is any evidence which shows that people on the earth should not learn Mandarin, then we possibly have to go to the Moon or Mars whatever to teach aliens. :-(

Fortunately, that’s not the picture I would image after reading the whole thing. :-) The author pins out a very good point of view that a better way about learning Mandarin should to make it voluntary rather than compulsory. For example, having it as a student club in campus and interesting the demand of learning Mandarin language by sharing and discussing the Chinese culture, food, beverages, games, dramas, knots, songs, poems, paint, calligraphies, architectures, astrology, and history.


And that’s what I am doing in this blog. I am trying to introduce the readers everything related to Mandarin course and/or Mandarin classes as broad as possible and I have done something so far, for instance, the famous Chinese table game, cultural difference, Chinese festivals, and so on. Wish you would enjoy the stuff here and please remember to leave your comments for bettering this site. Thank you.

Interesting Mandarin course --- Learning from a traditional Chinese game --- Má Jiàng

This is an interesting table game usually played by four people. And according to some research, playing this game may effectively prevent elders from getting Alzheimer’s disease because under no circumstances can one win this game only by luck without frequently brain activities of memorizing, calculating, evaluating, and decision making.

Let’s cut to the chase, the Chinese characters appear in this game are easy. You will learn the Chinese numbers from one to nine and several simple but useful characters as follows,

Traditional	Simplified	pinyin	Meaning
一	一	yī	One
二	二	èr	Two
三	三	sān	Three
四	四	sì	Four
五	五	wǔ	Five
六	六	liù	Six
七	七	qī	Seven
八	八	bā	Eight
九	九	jiǔ	Nine
萬	万	wàn	Ten thousand (I discussed this unit difference in a previous article.)
中	中	zhōng	Middle
發	发	fā	Here it means “發財” = “become rich”.
東	东	dōng	East
南	南	nán	South
西	西	xī	West
北	北	běi	North

Here is a downloadable FREE stand-alone version Má Jiàng software, share with you --- my dear readers.