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10.25.2016

Middlebury--A Rose Academy Review

Spanish, French, German or Chinese {Middlebury Interactive Languages}
My son has been learning Chinese with Middlebury Interactive Languages. He has been using the Elementary Chinese 1 for grades 3-5 as his guide. This has been a fun and interactive learning adventure for us. The course is completely taught in Chinese using an immersive technique. For the purpose of this course it is assumed that the student has no previous understanding of the language. The course begins with the very basics and is taught by native speakers.
We received this curriculum with a six month subscription, which gives us six months of access to complete the program with the option to extend our learning to a full year if necessary. The suggested pacing is to work on 3 lessons per week. We have easily been able to accomplish that and many weeks we were able to complete more than 3 lessons. The lessons are not long and they are visually engaging. Some of the activities really challenge the student to focus and really pay attention to what is being taught on the screen.
This course is more than just learning how to speak Chinese. There are stories about Chinese culture and the student learns how to write the Chinese characters as well. So they see the characters while they are hearing the pronunciation. I did not expect my son to master every thing that he learned, but he has done quite well in learning many new things. I am having him go through this course as an interest survey to see if it is something that he would like to continue learning. Of course the Chinese language is so interesting and there is so much to learn that he would need to continue learning the material for several years to be truly fluent.
There are 16 units in the complete elementary level for grades 3-5. Each unit has 6 lessons. If you complete 3 lessons per week, you can get through one unit every two weeks. This is a reasonable pace and puts you on track to finish the course during an entire school year. Some days my son wanted to continue working so he would do more than one lesson per day. The units cover many basic speaking concepts:
  • Unit 1: numbers
  • Unit 2: greetings
  • Unit 3: family
  • Unit 4: home
  • Unit 5: adjectives/colors
  • Unit 6: school
  • Unit 7: food
  • Unit 8: review units 1-7
  • Unit 9: animals
  • Unit 10: friends
  • Unit 11: nature
  • Unit 12: seasons
  • Unit 13: clothing
  • Unit 14: places
  • Unit 15: professions
  • Unit 16: review unit 9-15
I think it is great that he is so interested in learning Chinese, and I hope he will continue learning and will be able to remember what he has learned for the future.
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