How We Teach Chinese

The ChildFirst Approach

Learning Chinese is different from learning English.

English is largely phonetic. Once children understand the relationship between letters and sounds, phonics allows them to decode words they have never seen before.

Chinese works differently. A Chinese character is a visual symbol carrying meaning. There is no equivalent of simply sounding out an unfamiliar character letter by letter.

So we don’t teach Chinese the way we teach English.

At ChildFirst, we have developed an approach around how Chinese actually works — beginning with immersion, building character recognition, progressing to reading, and using AI to reinforce what each child needs to remember.

Immersion → CRWR → Chinese Step Readers → AI Chinese

1. Start with the Environment

Half a day in spoken Mandarin. Every day.

Children learn language best when they are surrounded by it.

That is why Chinese at ChildFirst is not a Chinese lesson squeezed into an otherwise English-speaking day. Chinese is the language of the environment for half of every school day.

Children hear Mandarin spoken by their teachers and classmates. They speak Mandarin, listen to stories, sing songs, recite poems, play and learn through Mandarin, and use the language to communicate throughout their daily activities.

They are not simply learning about Chinese. They are learning to use Chinese.

For a child attending from age four to six, that adds up to more than 3,000 hours of Chinese exposure.

That is a very different experience from having a Chinese lesson a few times a week.

The goal is for Mandarin to become a language children live in, rather than something they study from the outside.

What can immersion make possible?

Watch a ChildFirst child from an expatriate family recite a Chinese poem.

Why I believe early exposure matters

There is a reason early exposure matters.

During early childhood, the brain is constantly strengthening some neural connections while pruning others. The pathways that are repeatedly used become more efficient; those that are not used become weaker.

Language is one of the clearest examples.

I experienced this myself.

I grew up in Hong Kong speaking Cantonese. When I moved to the United States, I had to work hard for years to perfect my English. English was something I had to consciously develop.

Mandarin was different.

Although I had initially resisted speaking Mandarin at home, I had been exposed to it from an early age. Years later, when I needed to use Mandarin, I found that I could converse in it naturally and effortlessly.

That experience made me think deeply about the importance of early exposure.

If we want children to learn a language naturally, we should give them the environment early enough for the brain to use it.

The answer is therefore not simply more Chinese lessons.

It is more meaningful Chinese exposure.

2. Teach Chinese the Way Chinese Works

Chinese Rapid Word Recognition 快字通

Once children have a Chinese environment, the next question is:

How do we teach them to recognise Chinese characters?

This is where our Chinese Rapid Word Recognition (CRWR) programme comes in.

We don’t simply give children a list of Chinese characters to memorise.

Some Chinese words occur so frequently that children need to recognise them readily — words such as 一、我、是、的、不. These form an important foundation for reading.

The more distinctive part of CRWR is the way we connect characters through their shapes, roots and meanings.

Instead of treating every character as an isolated item, children learn related characters together.

For example, 木 means wood or tree. Two 木 characters form 林, meaning woods. Three form 森, meaning forest. And when 人 is placed beside 木, we get 休, meaning to rest.

But children don’t simply memorise these relationships. The characters become part of a story.

In the animated story, the person has planted many trees. After all that work, the person becomes tired and leans against a tree to rest.

人 + 木 = 休

The character, its meaning and the story therefore reinforce one another.

This is the idea behind our Story Rhymes.

Children hear the rhyme, see the characters come together, watch the story being animated, and participate in the story themselves.

They can see it → hear it → say it → sing it → move with it → understand it.

The same character can therefore be experienced through several different pathways.

A child who loves music may remember the rhyme. A child who enjoys movement may remember acting out the story. A child who responds to pictures may remember the animation. A child who loves language may enjoy telling the story back.

The character is the same. The pathway into learning can be different.

3. From Recognising Characters to Reading

Chinese Step Readers 自读通

Recognising characters is only the beginning.

Children need to use what they know to read.

That is why CRWR is followed by our Chinese Step Readers.

The Step Readers are a sequence of short stories written using characters children have already learnt through CRWR.

As children progress, more vocabulary is introduced and the stories become more challenging.

This creates an important bridge:

I recognise this character.

I recognise these words.

I can read this sentence.

I can read this story myself.

Rather than confronting children with large amounts of unfamiliar vocabulary, we build reading progressively on what they already know.

The aim is not simply to teach children more characters. It is to help them discover the pleasure and confidence of reading independently.

4. Make Learning Stick

AI Chinese — Personalised Revision

There is another problem with learning Chinese:

Recognising a word today does not necessarily mean remembering it tomorrow.

This is where AI Chinese complements our teaching.

CRWR provides the initial learning.

AI Chinese helps with retention.

The system tracks the words each child has encountered and identifies those that need more practice. It then brings those words back periodically through games and activities.

So instead of every child receiving exactly the same revision list, each child has a personalised list of words to strengthen.

One child may need to practise one group of words, while another child may already know those words but need reinforcement of a completely different set.

The learning therefore becomes more individualised.

And because the system tracks each child’s progress, we can see more clearly what the child knows — and what the child still needs to work on.

CRWR and AI Chinese therefore play different but complementary roles:

CRWR helps children learn and recognise.

AI Chinese helps them remember.

AI is not replacing the teacher or the Chinese environment. It adds a level of individual tracking and personalised reinforcement that is difficult to provide manually for every child.

5. What Can Children Achieve?

The combination of immersion, CRWR, Chinese Step Readers and AI Chinese can produce results that surprise parents — especially parents who do not speak Chinese at home.

By K2, our children can recognise more than 50% of the Chinese vocabulary expected in the Singapore Primary 1 curriculum.

And the range can be much higher for individual children. In one of our videos, for example, a child demonstrates recognition of more than 80%.

From 12 Characters to More Than 400

The progress of one child illustrates what sustained exposure and personalised revision can achieve. When the child was in N2, the system recorded just 12 Chinese characters with more than 50% confidence. As the child progressed through K1 and K2, the vocabulary grew steadily — from a small foundation of familiar characters to more than 400 characters by K2.

What is particularly striking is not only the increase in the number of characters, but also the level of confidence. By K2, the vast majority of the characters recorded were in the 91–100% confidence range, suggesting that the child was not simply encountering more characters, but becoming increasingly secure in recognising them.

The diagrams below show this progression over time — from 12 characters to more than 400, and from emerging recognition to high-confidence recognition.

The important point is not simply the number.

It is what the number represents: years of early exposure, a methodology designed specifically for Chinese, progressive reading practice, and personalised reinforcement of what each child needs to learn.

The ChildFirst Chinese Learning Journey

1. Immerse

Half a day of Chinese every day gives children thousands of hours of meaningful exposure.

2. Recognise

CRWR helps children understand Chinese characters through high-frequency words, character families, roots, rhymes and stories.

3. Read

Chinese Step Readers allow children to apply the characters they already know and progressively develop independent reading.

4. Remember

AI Chinese identifies the words each child needs to practise and provides personalised reinforcement.

Environment creates exposure. Method creates understanding. Reading creates fluency. AI helps make learning stick.

Chinese Is More Than a Language

We believe Chinese gives children more than another language.

It gives them access to another culture, another way of expressing ideas, and another way of seeing the world.

But none of this happens simply because a preschool puts “Chinese” on its timetable.

It requires the right environment, the right methodology, the right progression, and increasingly, the ability to use technology to understand and support each individual child.

That is what we have spent years building at ChildFirst.

Chinese is not something we add to the curriculum. It is an environment children grow in.