Chinese Learning

1. Why children should learn Chinese?
In my opinion, all children, whose native tongue is not Chinese, should learn Chinese as second language. Learning Chinese will give the younger generation a sharp-edge advantage in every aspect of their future life, strategically, culturally, and practically. More details...

2. The reason why NOT to teach babies pinyin
One of the primary purposes to invent pinyin was to promote a national language, Standard Mandarin (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu), since China has 56 nationalities speaking seven different languages and over 400 dialects.

Besides political convenience, pinyin was invented to establish a phonetic way to connect with Chinese characters, a more semantic written system. In addition, pinyin indicates the exact tone with additional punctuation, making it simpler to understand highly tonal and homophonic Chinese words.

Nevertheless, all these benefits are of little use to babies who just start to learn language. More details...