Last month, I met up with a friend from Singolingua, a publishing house that deals exclusively with teaching and learning Chinese materials. He has collaborated with Yale University on a series of books called Encounters. These books, which have accompanying multimedia components, were trialled with a select group of beginner students this past summer at Tsignhua Univeristy.

He also mentioned an interesting future plan to devise and shoot a Reality TV programme that will follow foreign students as they learn Chinese as beginner’s. The idea is to not only to showcase how appealing learning Chinese can be, but also to heighten the awareness of native-Chinese speakers to non-natives learning their language.

I was gifted the Character Writing Workbook 1 for Beginner’s in the picture, before it was known that I can already write more than 1200 characters! Never mind! Anyway, I would like to review the learning strategies that are put forward for remembering characters, their meanings and stroke order. As one can never get enough help in that area.