Hello folks,
I see the lr Chinese simplified curriculum has quite a bit of pin yin. This is too bad as I really didn’t want to introduce this topic. Would much rather have my son learn mandarin as a native would, immersion. I have a friend coming over on Sunday who is going to double check the program for pin yin in other segments.
Does anyone have any tips on how to easily skip the pin yin parts? I would rather not go in and out of each segment of the sessions to manually skip it.
Bummer.
Hi Evelyn,
I totally understand your reasons for wanting this change to the course and you’re in luck, it’s very easy to do!
Go to the “PLAY & EDIT” tab right at the top of your Little Reader app window.
Click on the “Courses” button at the top of the left panel.
Select the course you wish to edit (in this case “BrillKids Chinese (Simplified) Semester 1”) from the display dropdownlist.
Click on the “Edit” button under this dropdownlist.
Notice how the courses are built out of sessions and each session consists of a list of lessons. You can delete individual lessons by selecting it’s session tab, then selecting the lesson itself, click on the double down arrow that appears on the lesson item once you’ve selected it and click on “Delete” on the drop down menu that pops up. In your particular case, you might first delete the two lessons “Pinyin 1” and “Pinyin 2” under “Session 1” (lesson items look like buttons on the left of a session tab) then move on to the “Session 2” tab and do the same there.
Remember to save then say yes when a prompt comes up asking if you would like to rebuild the course. (You might want to take note of what day in the course you were on before you do this, because all days in the course will be reset to display as “not played” once you’ve rebuilt the course.)
I hope my instructions are clear, but feel free to ask more questions, I’ll be happy to assist.
Wow, MamaofWill, thank you so much!
That was so super easy! All the Pinyin is gone, and I was also able to remove the game function. My boy is only nine months old, and therefore a little young for the game. I do the game in LR, but often get the answers wrong in LRMandarin :meh: , so better to have it gone.
I’m very impressed with this software, I have a feeling over the coming months (years!), I’ll be learning all sorts of cool things to do.
Are there any customizations that you would recommend? Any content that I could insert in place of the Pinyin? Any other customizations that people frequently do to get the most out of the content? I have LR (English & Simplified Mandarin) & LM. LMu is on my wishlist. :happy: I have seen people say that like replacing the LM icons with images that their children like, but haven’t heard of much else beyond that.
Thanks again!
PS - now that I’m reflecting on it, I would have liked to have had the “Sounds” in the pinyin exercise, but just not the letter association. Will look at the possibility of replacing the image.
Indeed, LR is a very useful application. My boy just turned 4, we’ve been using LR for 3 years and we’re still using it every day!
I was part of a team of BrillKids collaborators who created this community course:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx7Udmyn-gk
Everybody involved got the course for free, but anybody else can still purchase it (in the form of a small donation towards the Early Learning Foundation) from the BrillKids store. You will hear and see from the video that it’s not quite BrillKids quality, but it is a lovely and very useful course in the end and shows the potential of what we can do with LR at home. Once you have the course, you could easily adapt it for use with a baby or one could even extend it or have it run much faster for an older child.
How about we change the Pinyin categories to display Chinese characters instead (we might need help though, I just did a search on the net and I think this might be harder than it sounds at first)? You might also want to add some Chinese cartoons or other educational Chinese programs at the end of a lesson. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8TioFHubWFvJ3ijWovmCYes-jKfgPqnn or https://www.youtube.com/user/KidsChineseLessons/playlists for examples.
I worked with a friend and converted the English course categories into full sentences, so in this converted version the text does not say “clap” it says the picture audio instead “Can you clap your hands?” (both the text and audio) and then the picture only says “clap.” This is a useful conversion (I would imagine) for nonnative English parents who are teaching English as a foreign language. It’s also a good next step once your child is reading words, to move on to reading sentences. I have been wanting to do this conversion to full sentences for other language courses too, including Chinese.
As far as I know, LMu and LM does not allow you to edit the courses themselves. There are quite a bit of settings you can play with, but I must admit, I don’t know my way around these apps as well as I know LR.
MamaofWill,
Thank you for the additional tips and the link to the sesame street in mandarin. Love the idea of inserting a little video at the end.
That country course you helped create is incredibly extensive, so wonderful that you and your team put that together. I need to start culling through the available LR materials, there are some real gems out there.