There are over 85 000 words in the Chinese language and interestingly, Mandarin Chinese is regarded as the hardest language for an English speaker to learn. Increasingly lesser families are speaking Mandarin at home and students now are more inclined to engage in English content leaving exposure to the Chinese language to a minimal. Most of the time students now only interact in Mandarin during those 4 – 6 hours a week during Chinese periods in school. With a class of 30- 40 students in school, the teacher also does not have the luxury of time to cater to the varying levels of students’ ability. This results in too little usage of Mandarin, and even lesser reading and writing of the Chinese language for students to be proficient at it. Moreover, the emphasis on memorization methods of learning often used in schools makes learning the language dull, tedious, difficult and sadly, counterproductive. Memorizing the strokes for a spelling test or the meaning of words for an exam, takes up a lot of study time but unfortunately, because when we memorize something it only stores in the short-term memory part of our brain, we are more than likely to forget it after the test. We do not want our children to learn Chinese just to pass their exams or to get a better overall score, do we? The Chinese language is now already the second most used language in the world, and as China grow in economic might, the ability to read and write in Chinese will become an increasingly important asset that our children can leverage on when they reach adulthood. With Chinese enrichment classes like EduGrove’s, commonly tested keywords are not only revised, students are taught vocabularies and phrases that schools just do not have enough time within their curriculum to cover. EduGrove’s methodology and focus on long term memory retention of vocabularies learnt through discussions, active learning and improvisational drama, ensures that the students not only see improvement in their academic scores, but become confident operators of the language for life!

Research has shown that babies begin acquiring language before they are even born, with the best time to learn a language with native-speaker proficiency is when the child interacts using the language from the crucial years of 0 – 10 yrs old. From our years of experience teaching, we have found that children in Singapore who have had limited interaction using the Chinese language during their early years, tend to struggle with the Chinese language subject when they get to the primary school age. With more and more families in Singapore being predominantly English speaking, Mandarin is now more of a foreign language than a Mother Tongue; which unfortunately is the proficiency level expected and the syllabus designed for in schools. Moreover, with both parents at work, many toddlers are often left in the care of domestic helpers or grandparents with little to no structured curriculum that can stimulate the child’s cognitive, language and physical development. At EduGrove, our Mandarin PlayGrove – Adult Accompanied Playgroup Programme is not only designed to immerse 1 – 3 year olds in an all Mandarin environment, it is specially designed with activities and stations to aid the overall development of a child in these crucial early years. Stimulation through play, songs, and art, help these little ones use their body and senses and develops their thinking, intelligence, hand-eye coordination, physique, motor skills, all while primarily acquiring the Chinese language.

At EduGrove, we understand that learning Chinese can be tedious and difficult for students in Singapore, with most schools focusing on short term memorizing methods of learning. Unfortunately, that is not the most effective way to learn languages. Our brain is just not programmed to remember things we memorized forever, as it is only stored in the short-term memory. At EduGrove, we want to make learning Chinese FUN, ENGAGING, and most importantly, EFFECTIVE, where keywords and phrases are taught using active play and role playing drama techniques so that they are remembered in the long term memory. You see, we learn languages best when we use it, not when we study it. Thus, through these games and improvisational drama, we coax the students into vocalizing and applying what they’d learnt, to not only ensure they attain a good understanding of the meaning of the vocabularies, but also so that they are already using them naturally in their speech. We also believe that teachers play a very important to a child’s interest in a subject. As such, we only select native Mandarin speakers who graduated from the top universities, many of them with Master Degrees in Teaching or Chinese Language, so that they are not only of fountain of knowledge, creativity, and passion, they also have a good command of English to help students of any level.