Do you teach Simplified or Traditional Script?

For lower elementary (K-2), we teach Traditional script characters and zhuyin (bopomofo).

• Traditional characters often give children visual clues to the meaning of the underlying words. These help get kids into the habit of learning & recognizing Chinese pictographs.
• Zhuyin (bopomofo) uses symbols originally derived from Chinese characters to represent phonetic sounds. Because of the use of underlying Chinese characters, learning zhuyin is a great way for kids to get early practice with Chinese character stroke patterns. Since “pinyin” relies on the English alphabet, having children use “pinyin” for Chinese pronunciation can cause confusion as children are also learning English pronunciation at school during grades K-2.

Our goal is to have a mix of formal classroom instruction combined with interactive play-based activities to help children improve their verbal communication ability and improve their character recognition ability.

As children progress into grades 3-5, we will introduce Simplified characters and Pinyin.