Chinese Language Courses

With the encouragement of Dr. White and the belief that the knowledge of an Eastern language will give Alpha children a head start in an ever-global world, I am pleased to announce that for the first time the Alpha School will bee offering a language course in Chinese (Mandarin) and culture.

Although the goal of most language courses focuses on fluency, this introductory course is designed exclusively for a foundation in Chinese diction and writing basics.  The main goal of this course will be to introduce fundamental Chinese used in all Chinese words and perfecting their pronunciation.  Each of the 37 Chinese sounds and their phonetic combinations used in pronouncing Chinese words must first be developed in order to create a foundation for fluency.  Diction is the foundation of spoken Chinese.  The children will also be taught a portion of the 43 radical characters used in Chinese writing.  These 43 radicals provide the key to over 3,700 words of the 5,000 basic Chinese characters necessary to communicate comfortably.  This project is quite ambitious; however the success of the course will not be measured by grades or proficiency in the language, but rather by our ability to maintain the interest of our children and their curiosity to explore a new and foreign language that will ultimately lead them to success and fluency in the Chinese language.

Language skills take years to build, which is especially true of a complex language such as Mandarin.   Studies in neuroscience have demonstrated that a child’s auditory complex has the highest level of activity around the age of 12.  Children have a higher chance of learning to speak a language accent free at a younger age.  MRI scans show that bilingual adults who learned two languages as infants have one single brain region, known as the Broca’s area, for both languages while those who learned two languages after the age of 12 have two separate Broca’s areas, one for each language.  This demonstrates that there is a profound difference in the language-learning process between children and adults, and furthermore it reinforces the importance of exposing our children to different languages at an early age.

 By: Lin-li Chen