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Poetry
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Quote Poetry Replybullet Topic: Chinese Children's Books
    Posted: 22 April 2007 at 5:24pm
Hi,
Can anyone suggest some good children's books in Chinese?  Simple things --colors, numbers, shapes, fruit, etc. 
 
It would be especially helpful if the pictures had both the pinyin and the character to describe them. 
 
--Poetry
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TheBigZaboon
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Quote TheBigZaboon Replybullet Posted: 22 April 2007 at 11:31pm
Poetry,
 
Answering your question is not as easy as it could be. In addition to what to get, you really have to consider where to get it. You'll also have to compete with all the parents in the Chinese diaspora desparately looking for books to get their children interested in learning Chinese.
 
First, I'll try to give you a couple of reputable places (among many, many places offering them) to find Chinese children's books, then I'll try to give you some caveats about reading the descriptions of books offered. What you're told isn't always what you'll get.
 
First, in terms of places to buy, I'll limit the choices to those in the US. There are many reasons for this, but the most important is probably that the prices of the books themselves are so cheap, that if you buy from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Singapore, the purchase will represent 5-10% of your expenditure, and the shipping will will take up the rest. Returning the books, usually not an option overseas, would be prohibitively expensive. Anyway, three places to begin to look are (in no particular order): 
chinese-school.netforms.com/Chinese-books-for-children.html
 
These places, being in the US, offer you all of the credit card protection (such as it is) and shipping-cost advantages you're likely to get. There are others, but be carefull about where they are located. This is not always obvious from the web page information. If you pay overseas, make sure there is a pay option like PayPal available, but beware of the shipping costs.
 
Next, let's look at the problem of descriptions. Chinese children are expected to learn more earlier than are western children in many, many, areas. As reading and writing are the cornerstones of Chinese education and culture, anything indicating a grade level, implying the child has already started school, will be too advanced for what you were asking for in your post. The Chinese child who starts school without  some characters under his or her belt soon finds life has suddenly gotten a lot less livable. Look for descriptions that specify ages 2-3 or, at the latest, ages 3-4. Promises of pinyin are also not a good guide to the age group suitablity, as pinyin often appears in books for children as old as 7 or 8, and in some types of books, even later.
 
Also, be careful that the book is not intended for Chinese children to learn English. Books of this sort often contain no Chinese at all, just pictures and words written in roman letters. On the chinabooks site, there is a book called, I think, "Alphabet, Fruits and Colors," but I think it's for learning English. Beware.... To make your problem worse, on the chinesemall site, there are a number of books in a series called "Learning Words from Pictures" that looks pretty good, but they are marked as Sold Out. You'll have to watch the site for restocking of the supply.
 
I'm afraid this may present a daunting picture of the problem of obtaining picture books for the youngest children, but it's one faced by all overseas Chinese, too. 
 
Finally, another solution might be to go to your local Chinatown and look around for locally produced books for American Chinese kids. These are usually produced by the local Benevolent Association, or a local public school for its own kids.
 
If you are looking for substantial amounts of such books, contact me privately, and I will try to find a contact for you. If you are looking for them for your library, then I have some other ideas we can talk about off line. 
 
Hope this helps, although I think I have already told you more than you want to know about penquins.
 
The Big Zaboon
 
Edited: Here's one book that might help, and it seems to have some English, so you won't have to look things up from the pinyin. But beware, it will have a lot of words, giving you an idea of what a 2-4 year old Chinese kid is supposed to absorb before his/her school life begins.
 
 
TBZ 


Edited by TheBigZaboon - 23 April 2007 at 6:47am
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Poetry
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Quote Poetry Replybullet Posted: 25 April 2007 at 9:23pm
Hi Big Zaboon,
Thank you for the tips.  Yeah, I'd kinda found out that buying from the Asian sources is just not for the faint of heart.  You see, I have this Asian drama habit, myself....
 
Books just seem so hard to come by, but given my family's reaction when I told them that I was enrolling our daughter in a Chinese class and seeking a tutor, well, I can see why books in Chinese just aren't seen as a seller.  My family thinks I may be certifiable, I think.  I explained to my husband that if we work on it now, our daughter may not have a very pronounced American accent in Chinese.  That's rather important to try for.  And Chinese is...while grammaticly rather simple to handle...the pronunciation is absolutely difficult for an adult.  I just can't get the tonals at all.  I can sort of hear them, I just can't mimic them.  Our daughter mimics them perfectly when she chooses to not be 'shy.'
 
Our soon to be 4-year-old is attending a weekend Chinese pre-school that is taught in very typical Chinese fashion.  It's a two hour class of put the picture on the board, put the character on the board, and recite the name.  Then have everyone recite the name.  Then have everyone recite counting "two balloons"  (sounds like 'liang ga chi chow') or something like.  I've been working on a couple of words like 'apple' and 'pear' and 'peach' with her, but we haven't even begun with the characters because she is not really grasping the fact that she can write letters in combination yet --though she's picked up that she can read them in combination.  It won't be long coming, but we'll see how she does. 
 
The teacher very kindly told me that most of these children spend two years in her class.  Our daughter is one of the youngest there.  And there's only one other little blonde tyke, the rest are pure Chinese with the occasional Chinese child and adoptive parent. 
 
The weekend school exists because the local Chinese community was worried that their kids would grow up Americanized (stupidly unable to read characters) and wanted them to have some 'real' school.  After seeing it, well, they put a lot of emphasis on rote memorization.  Given the wide and rich character set, I can understand why you'd have to do that.
 
We have the Muzzy materials, but not much else is out there that is useful that I've found.  I'll check out the sources you gave and maybe there's a trip to the Washington, DC Chinatown in our future. 
 
Thanks!
--Poetry
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TheBigZaboon
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Quote TheBigZaboon Replybullet Posted: 25 April 2007 at 10:47pm
Poetry,
 
Your nice reply sent me scampering back to a couple of the sites I mentioned in my earlier post. I'm glad I looked again, because I found that the book I thought might not include Chinese (Fruits, Colors, etc., on the chinabooks site), does seem to be in both Chinese and English. If it includes pinyin for the Chinese, it might fill the bill. The book is also part of a series that seems to be elementary enough for your child in a few months, when she begins to grasp what's expected of her. The series contains a number of other books that seem to be on a word by word level rather than on a sentence by sentence level. Maybe you should try one and see if it fits your needs.
 
There is another book on that site called "Long is a Dragon," which claims to be a book for teaching children to write Chinese. I don't know if it is elementary enough, but I think it's worth a try.
 
I hope I'm not being impolite in saying that I think these books would do you a bit of good, too. If you understand what your child is expected to understand, it might be easier on both of you. For example, looking up pinyin for background somewhere is a good idea. I think you wrote somewhere that you studied Arabic at DLI, so you know what heartburn romanization systems can induce. It is not as bad as some of the Arabic romanizations, but there are a few sounds in pinyin that are written differently from the same sound in English, and this may be a source of some confusion for your child. For example, the syllable "cun" in pinyin would be pronounced roughly like "tsun" in English, not with a "c" or a "k" sound. If you understand these things, you can anticipate problems, maybe. 
 
Finally, I want to say I am in awe of your efforts to help supply language materials to the Army and National Guard troops that need them so badly. As a vet (and a DLI grad, too), I know how slow, sluggish, and short-sighted the military system can be, even though it doesn't mean to be so. I live in Zaboonistan, and I can't buy DLI or NTIS materials because they won't ship overseas, so I sometimes feel guilty in not being able to participate in the generous efforts made by others on this site. I am doubly embarrassed by, and yet very proud of your efforts on behalf of people for whom this is possibly a life-saving issue. Thanks. (Here's where I step off, or fall off, the soapbox....)
 
TBZ
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Quote Poetry Replybullet Posted: 25 April 2007 at 11:25pm
Hi TBZ,
Zaboonistan, eh?  I've got some ideas what corner of the world that is in. 
 
Even if there is no pinyin, I'll write it in with the teacher's help.  Yes, I fully expect that I'll be learning Chinese too.  I watch Muzzy videos with the small one, and we practice simple sentences.  I can't help but wonder if those Muzzy videos have subliminals, though.  I have yet to see one from start to finish without falling asleep about 3/4 of the way through it and wake up with a searing headache and some phrase stuck in my head.  Ah, good times.
 
There is an adult bilingual class that runs at the same time as her pre-school class, but that would mean that Mommy wouldn't be there to let her sit on my lap and draw things in a notebook and if she sits by herself she starts getting all teary and lost looking.  Really pitiful.  So, for a while we'll just be doing this together.  She's not ready to fly solo in that Chinese class. 
 
I am going to find a Chinese student to help practice with.  I am getting one of our staff members to write a note in Chinese so that I can post it over at the English Institute where the foreign students pay expensive sums of money to come learn intensive English for two months.  I'm hoping to use the barter system of we'll speak English to you and invite you out to see the sights with us, and you speak Chinese to us and help us learn. 
 
But I'm in my 40's now, so language learning is not anywhere as easy as it once was.  It's like my brain is Teflon unless it's repeated so many times that I can hold onto it.  And I don't know that I'll hold it forever or just until the next episode of The Brady Bunch pops into my head and displaces it.
 
I'll go check out that book.  And yes, the romanization leads to --mispronunciation.  ;-)   (But it helps me, I swear....)
 
--Poetry
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daristani
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Quote daristani Replybullet Posted: 26 April 2007 at 5:46am
Here's a page with some materials listed:

http://www.chinese-outpost.com/language/children/

There used to be a series of three books, with cassettes, called "Chinese for Children", that had pinyin, and, I think, characters as well, that I got for my daughter a number of years ago when she first got interested in Chinese.  I'm not sure how much she learned from it, but she kept up her interest, and now has a BA in Chinese, so getting kids interested at an early age, even if they don't learn all that much, can have a long-term  effect.
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onebir
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Quote onebir Replybullet Posted: 19 May 2007 at 5:53am
It might be worth asking over on www.chinese-forums.com.  & one of the forum members runs www.lovemandarin.com, which sells mainland publications at mainland bookstore prices, & has a children's section...
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