Chinese New Year is on January 25, 2020, and it’s the most important holiday in the Chinese calendar. For a fun celebration, try these Chinese New Year activities with your kids. Whether it’s making Chinese dumplings, learning the Gong Xi, Gong Xi song, making “hong bao” red packets or writing greeting cards, your kids will love them.
Continue reading “Chinese New Year Activities for Kids”Meet Xin, a beloved Mandarin Chinese tutor celebrating her third year with PandaTree. We caught up to learn more about how she became who she is and to get her tips for kids learning Chinese.
Continue reading “22 Questions with Chinese Tutor Xin”
“Learning Chinese is just like planting trees. You’ll have a good harvest after you work diligently.”
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The Advanced Placement® Chinese Language and Cultural exam is growing in popularity as people realize the value of Chinese proficiency for future career opportunities and cultural fluency. In fact, the AP® Chinese exam is now the third-most popular AP language exam after AP Spanish Language and Culture and AP French Language and Culture.
In this post, we’ll share an overview of Advanced Placement exams, we’ll take a look at the AP Chinese Exam and its components, and we’ll share grading trends. Then we’ll look question by question at the exam, describe what to expect, and offer tips to maximize your score. Finally, we’ll share some advice on how to best prep for the exam. So if the AP Chinese and Culture exam is in your future, read on! Continue reading “The AP® Chinese Exam: PandaTree’s Tips to Ace It Everything you need to know for the May 6 exam“
Learning a new language is both exciting and challenging, and the younger your child starts a second language, the more easily she will learn to speak it. Immersion programs for children, particularly Spanish and Mandarin, have been growing very rapidly and are often over-subscribed. If your child is lucky enough to be learning a foreign language in an immersion program, you may feel unsure how to support her–especially if you don’t speak the language yourself. Don’t worry. There are ways to help your child on the language-learning journey.
By Kristina Klausen, MBA and Mingyu Sun, Ph.D.
In Part One of this series we looked at some surprising ways that Mandarin Chinese is easier to learn than other languages. Children learning Mandarin are happy to discover that Mandarin has no verb conjugations and no irregular spelling or grammar. That said, Mandarin has a reputation for being a challenging language – so for parents who are interested in having their children learn Mandarin we’ll take a look at the challenges and how they can be addressed.
By Kristina Klausen, MBA and Mingyu Sun, Ph.D.
Chinese has a reputation of being a tough language to learn, but have you ever wondered why that is? Nearly a billion people in the world speak Mandarin Chinese – so clearly learning it is possible. However, if you’re a parent thinking about having your children learn Mandarin as a second language, you probably want to know more about whether Mandarin Chinese is a hard language for kids to learn.
What might surprise you is that, in some ways, Mandarin is easier to learn than English. In this article we’ll take a linguistic perspective and look at what makes Mandarin easier to learn than you might think and, in Part Two we’ll look at what makes Mandarin challenging.
We often get asked by parents for recommendations about Chinese books for kids to read, so we’re thrilled to support the launch of Great Chinese Reads’ Recommended Chinese Reading List. Experts at Great Chinese Reads reviewed more than 2,000 books and selected 50 for inclusion in a leveled, searchable database available for free to parents, educators and students. PandaTree was delighted to work with Great Chinese Reads to bring their list to life online. Here’s a discussion with Great Chinese Reads Founder, Stella Su.
Continue reading “An Interview with Stella Su, Founder of Great Chinese Reads”
January 29, 2017, Palo Alto, CA: The non-profit organization, Great Chinese Reads, together with the language learning company, PandaTree, announce the launch of an expert-selected Recommended Chinese Reading List for students in kindergarten through sixth grade who are learning Mandarin Chinese. The list of 50 recommended picture books is now available for free to parents and educators in a searchable database at PandaTree.com.
