Ok, I am not a rote dictating vocabulary list kinda Chinese teacher…but there is some kinda buzz in ‘seeing’ your ‘Chinese character’ progress!!!!

两千汉字的目标 (liǎng qiān hàn zì de mù biāo) ‘Two Thousand Character Goal!’

When you can recognize the most common 2000 Chinese characters, you can read about 97% of a newspaper！  That doesn’t mean you can understand it all, because you still have to learn the compound word variations that those 2000 (and 50,000 rarer characters!) can make.  But being able to recognize these 2000 characters when reading, makes looking up new compound words so much easier and faster…making reading Chinese websites, story books and literature much more enjoyable and satisfying.

A visual on the wall, that shows you ‘the bigger picture’ of your character learning, can be a great motivator!!! We got these posters of the first 1000, and second 1000 Chinese characters a couple years ago.  The kids can already recognize most of the first thousand from reading lots of Chinese story books over the years.  But they have been going through a new program from a different developmental perspective to the other reading programs they have done in the past.  Now we have a new dedicated learning space, we thought it was an ideal time to hang them up again and start circling those characters as they are consolidating them in their new program.

We purchased our posters from Mandarin Poster.  Cool for the Mandarin Nerd, or to give kids a little competitive edge 🙂  Why should our kids learn how to read Mandarin? Click on the link, there are a lot more reasons than just ‘reading Chinese’!