Review of LET'S WRITE CHINESE WITH MEI MEI

Let's Write Chinese with Mei Mei, Books 1 & 2, by Mei Mei Hu.  Providence, Rhode Island: Mei Mei and Me, 2007.  $12.95 (2-book set)  ISBN 1-4243-1539-5.


The Foreign Service Institute lists Chinese as a Category 3 language--a language that's exceptionally difficult for English-speaking adults to learn, requiring twice as much study time as, say, Georgian, Turkish, or Vietnamese.  I assume that this classification is based on the complexity of the Chinese writing system, since the spoken language is not particularly difficult.  People like me who are trying to learn and thousands of Chinese characters and find ways of teaching them to our young children can use all the help we can get.

Mei Mei Hu's two-book set of Chinese-character writing workbooks features 176 single characters (Book I) and 176 two-character compound words and phrases (Book II) with four words or phrases per page and six large spaces in which to practice writing each character.  The number of words introduced in each book would be ideal to cover in a year-long Saturday-school course or a semester-long Chinese immersion course.  Children familiar with Mei Mei's "Play & Learn" DVD series will be happy to see many words whose meanings they already know.

These large-format books are easy for young children to handle, and the characters are carefully arranged so as to make them as easy to remember as possible.  The simplest and most common characters are taught first, and more difficult characters and compounds words and phrases are introduced gradually.  The first character of each compound in Book II is a character previously introduced in Book I, and most of the compounds are arranged in groups of four words or phrases with the same initial character, helping to reinforce characters already learned and set a foundation for further vocabulary development.

Mei Mei Hu's books are an essential tool in any child's Chinese-language education, especially considering that there are so few other character-writing workbooks available for English-speaking children; I have seen none of comparable intuitiveness and simplicity.  Recommended for ages 5 and up.