For those of you who don’t know, I actually attended a Mandarin-English bilingual school from Kindergarten to Grade Nine. Unfortunately, I have since forgotten much of what I once knew, so lately I’ve been looking into resources for more Chinese practice. I was actually shown these workbooks last year, but haven’t had a chance to dive into them properly until now.
- Textbooks and Workbooks
- iPad with Apple Pencil (optional)
In 2020-2021, this was the current curriculum being used by the Edmonton Chinese Bilingual Education Association in Edmonton. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the materials were all available online for free! The only thing holding me back from using them right away was the fact that it seemed like an awful amount of paper to get it all printed and ready to go. Last month, I finally bit the bullet and purchased an iPad and an Apple Pencil to go along with it, and it opened up a new door for Chinese practice. All of a sudden, I could do printing practice without worrying about wasting paper, and I didn’t have to tote around bundles of workbooks. The only slight downside is that these workbooks use Simplified characters, but for the most part I work around it by practicing with the Traditional characters anyways.
I decided to start at the beginning, just for the sake of completion, so I’ve been able to zip through the lessons pretty quickly so far. If I were to be honest, I would guess that my real abilities currently lie between the Grade Three / Grade Four boundaries, so I’ve got some work to do for sure. I’m not sure if it’s just because I’m a speech-language pathologist, but I feel very strongly about language being an essential cultural tie, and the older I get, the more I want to hold on to it.
I know that there are other graded readers out there, such as Sagebooks or Greenfield, but they are EXPENSIVE. As another factor, because I do have a bit of a base and can recognize a decent amount of characters, I’m not sure how much new learning I would do with either of those systems. I also feel that both systems are geared toward younger learners, and I didn’t want to feel like I was being taught down to. With these free workbooks, I can practice away to my heart’s content. Do you have any language learning goals? Do you use Duolingo or any other popular language apps? I would love to hear about your experience!
Until next time, happy crafting!