Some questions on the Wink to Learn Chinese program:
1. What is the rational of the colour coded radicals?
2. Any plan to increase interactivity of the program?
No matter how gd a dvd, putting a child long hours in the front of the TV simply flashing a few hundreds of words and pictures do not guarantee the absorption of the materials. It would be another baby-sitting program which give the parents a piece of mind cos it boasts a huge volume of educational content.
3. Rapid flashing with distorted voices
Is this issue being tackled as well?
Dear Jinjl,
Thank you very much for your helpful queries on our programs. Indeed these are worthy questions to be addressed in the forum. Please permit me to help you through with the questions one at a time.
1. What is the rational of the colour coded radicals?
WINKtoLEARN adopts multiple color-coding and fuse this helpful learning technique into her flashcards. Colors are able to help our brain to tag and remember things better. In Singapore, some reputable schools use colors to aid students in remember mathematical equations a lot faster and better.
We are mindful during the process of color-coding. For English, we use color to help children to differentiate syllables or sub-words. For Chinese, the colors are prescribed to help children in differentiating the different radicals within each word. During the process of learning, the child's mind will pick up subtlely the similiarities between words esp. in terms of radicals or different segments within each word.
Chinese is indeed a lot more complicated compared to English as it consists more than 5000 strokes. Because of this, it's not possible for us to categorize each radical using different colors. Esp. in this case, we have a certain spectrum of colors prescribed by experts for us to follow.
2. Any plan to increase interactivity of the program?
Unfortunately WINKtoLEARN's flashcard DVD programs are not meant to be baby sitting programs for parents. We always informed our parents that these DVDs are effectively like real flashcard sessions. Meaning to say, we always encourage parents to prescribe only 1-2 lessons a day for their child. For all our online orders, we also give away a free parents' guide to inform parents' about the curriculum and usage pattern. For non-Chinese speaking parents, this parents' guide is a wonderful help to them as we had translated every single word/phrase and sentence to English. This way, they would be able to be 100% sure about the entire syllabus.
Because it's a flashcard DVD program, the child will not spend more than 10 - 15 mins a day watching our programs. The critical success factor is the consistency of playing the programs. We would need parents to play each level for 1 month and hence move on to the next. There are a total of 6 levels and we had also included revision lessons within each level to help the child to have a quick revision on those words/phrases/sentences that they are learnt previously.
3. Rapid flashing with distorted voices
Our normal DVD flashcard speed is 2 second for the normal lessons. Rapid flashing lessons is only one lesson per DVD and the speed is around 1 second per flash. We encourage our parents to play the normal lessons for their child for better results. The rapid flashing is a bonus lesson per DVD for some customers who are keen about higher speed.
As the rapid flashing lessons are only a total of 6 lessons for the entire 6-DVDs, our key focus is on the 48 normal lessons for both Chinese and English. We might be putting more resources in improving on these 6 lessons.
Last but not least, we are in the midst of creating a new series of DVDs for young minds. The limelight of these DVDs is wildlife/animals. Through them, we are able to reach out to children in English and Chinese language acquisition.
For those who are interested in our new series, please feel free to register yourselves with
www.WINKtoLEARN.com as members. Once the programs are launched, we will notify you immediately. Of course, there will be some benefits for online purchases as well.
With this, I wish you a wonderful weekend rest ahead!
Hazel
Customer Service
www.WINKtoLEARN.com