Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

5Q Channel is a Mandarin reading web site based in Taiwan that was created to use computer animation to put classic Chinese stories into a form that kids would want to watch, listen to and read, all in Mandarin. Funded in part by the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, it aims to give students all over the world access to the story-telling tradition of China in a cartoon animated format that modern children love – and helping them read Chinese while they’re at it.

Last week a group of parents and teachers from Starr King and Jose Ortega elementary schools met with the creators of 5Q Channel, as they were in town to present at the Chinese Education Conference in San Francisco.

Mr. Tseng Jr-Shi, the general manager for the company that created the site, Lu Feng Technology, gave us an introduction to what our kids could find there.

It’s pretty cool.  There are also over 350 individuals stories that students from Kindergarten on up will enjoy watching. The topics include everything from classic Chinese stories such as the Journey to the West and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms to funny stories explaining the sometimes maddeningly confusing four-character sayings. These are part of any well-educated Chinese person’s daily speech, but you have to know the stories to know what they mean. I like that 5Q channel understood that kids wouldn’t know or care about classical allusions, so they’ve done cartoons illustrating them in modern settings.

Mostly it’s a closed site (no worries your child will click over into something you don’t want them seeing) where they can read along as they watch the story. You can set it for traditional or simplified characters, or English if you want to figure out what they’re looking at. The parents who attended the presentation were intrigued and of the 24 who’ve signed up so far, most report their kids are enjoying watching the cartoons – one more chance to tuck a little Mandarin-time into their day.

The Mandarin Immersion Parents Council negotiated a special yearly subscription price for the site, just $30 for one year. (We don’t make anything off it, we just liked it and offered to tell our parents about it.) However they’re only going to make it available for another two weeks. To sign up, click this link:

http://www.5qchannel.com/order/grouprate.htm

There aren’t many sites out there for Mandarin immersion students yet, so we were pleased to find this one, especially because they’re really going out of their way to make themselves useful to families where the kids read and speak Mandarin but the parents don’t. We’re sure more will be coming, but for now, this is a great place to let your kids play online and (many of us are thinking) a nice way to keep our kids’ Mandarin up during the summer months.

We’d love to hear more about how parents are using it, whether it’s helpful and what other resources you know of.

Beth