JJ Easy Chinese (1): Play with Six Basic Chinese Strokes by Jennifer Yu

Prepare for the Four Industry RevolutionNow the Fourth Industry Revolution is around, and we have to prepare for it. On December 7, 2012, Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman stated, “A critical time to shape productivity is from birth to age five when the brain develops rapidly to build the foundation of cognitive and character skills necessary for success school, health, career, and life. Early childhood education fosters cognitive skills, along with attentiveness, motivation, self-control, and sociability...Starting at age three or four is too little, too late, as it fails to recognize that skills beget skills in a complementary and dynamic way. Efforts should focus on the first years for the greatest efficiency and effectiveness…” (www.heckmanequation.org)Recently scientists, in particular, neurologists and physiologists, have drawn their attention to infantile bilingual learning. Dr. Kuhl, Co-Director of UW Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, addressed, “Children’s early language skills predict future reading abilities; conversely, those skills not developed early are difficult to remediate later on.” (Patricia The linguistic Genius of Babies | Video on TED.com). ” In the 21st Century, the world is globalized. Learning the Chinese language is not only because of China’s growing economy and the profound Chinese culture, but because the human brain mainly uses the left brain to process Pinyin text information, while the left and right brains are used to process Chinese character information. Each Chinese character is a figure and is more closely related to the right brain, promoting the balanced development of left and right brain functions. Scientists have discovered that children use their fingers to stimulate the brain, which can enhance the brain's vitality far more than rote memorization—thereby, the fingers are the outpost of wisdom, and their movements reflect the development of the brain, and the younger, the more obvious.After birth, the cells in a baby’s brain connect via five senses(vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch.) However, cell connection will disappear if stimulation does not continually repeat. Therefore, the book titled “JJ Easy Chinese” accent on birth through age six. Instead of traditional card-reading and word-copying, the book teaches the mother (or a caregiver, or a teacher) how to hold the baby’s finger moving along the strokes(touch-based), how to distinguish words’ similarities and differences (vision-based and observation-based), how to make words and phrases(creativity-based ), and so forth. The key is not to require a child to learn words or sentences but to bring the child to be interested in learning Chinese naturally and happily. There are videos on Book 1 Lesson 1 Héng 横, Lesson 2 Shù 竖, Lesson 3 Diǎn 点, Lesson 4 Piě 撇, Lesson 5 Nà 捺, and Lesson 6 提tí.