Chinese Immersion
(half-day daily)

TRILINGUAL ENVIRONMENT

CHINESE (half-day immersion daily)

Importance of Early Exposure in Mastering Chinese

The brain works on the principle of “use it or lose it”. Any of the brain’s neural networks not used will be pruned away (synaptic pruning) to save energy. If your child is not exposed sufficiently to Mandarin during pre-school years, he or she will not be able to hear the unique sounds of the Mandarin language. Learning Chinese will increasingly be more difficult with age and those who learn later will always speak with an accent. At ChildFirst, we provide half-day Chinese immersion every day. Each year, your child will be exposed to 1,000 hours of Chinese. Just like English, your child will pick up Chinese naturally and effortlessly. No amount of tuition later can replace this.

Effective Pedagogy for Rapid Word Recognition

Chinese is different from English because it is pictorial, not phonetic. Instead of teaching individual words, we group Chinese words based on their shapes and roots. Children learn these word families through rhymes and stories, which helps children learn faster and remember better. The stories are made into animations to make learning enjoyable and meanings clearer. By learning high-frequency words this way, children can start reading texts and books earlier. With our Chinese Rapid Word Recognition (CRWR) method, children learn about half of Primary 1 vocabulary before they graduate.

The learning of these groups of words are further enhanced and made more interesting via the use of “Rhyme and Stories”. Each family of words is then knitted together via a short story told in the form of rhymes to help children remember the characters more effectively and efficiently. The rhymes are animated to make learning even more fun. Together with the high frequency words, children can proceed to reading texts and books at a much younger age.

Watch the videos below to learn more.

Chinese Step Readers

Our Chinese Step Readers consists of a collection of lively short stories written in words that children have learnt in the Chinese Rapid Word Recognition (CRWR) programme. For example, Story 10 uses words from CRWR Book 1 to Book 10. More words are gradually introduced with each story. This progressive approach helps to build children’s confidence and cultivate their interest in reading independently.

Each reader has a reference list which indicates the CRWR book where each word is from. This serves as a useful guide to help children recall the words learnt. With improved Chinese reading skills, your child’s interest and self-esteem will flourish and this will help develop your child’s Chinese language to its fullest potential.

AI Chinese Personal Revision Tutor

Our CRWR programme helps children recognise Chinese characters effectively. However, just learning a word today does not guarantee remembering it later. How do we improve long-term memory retention? That is where our AI Chinese programme works alongside CRWR. It tracks words that each child needs to review and presents them periodically through fun games. This personalised approach means every child has a unique list of words to master.

Through repetition, these words gradually move into long-term memory. Even four-year-olds show significant improvement in Chinese word recognition, as seen in the reports. The left report from 7th June shows the child knowing 12 words with more than 50% accuracy. Five months later, the right report shows the child knowing 106 words with more than 50% accuracy.

Even better, home access is included, allowing you to track exactly which words your child knows. No more guesswork is involved.

Watch the videos below to learn more.

Our Success Story

Even families with no prior exposure to Chinese have seen remarkable results. Expatriate families, in particular, have found that their children thrive in our Chinese immersion environment, gaining confidence and fluency in the language much faster than they ever expected.

Our alumnus, Pablo, received an Outstanding Achievement Chinese Award at his primary school this year!

Pablo’s parents have shared their children’s success stories in learning Chinese! Watch this video to learn more.

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