According to our family, there are three important languages that should be learned by our son: Indonesia, English, and Chinese. As parent, we can teach English and Indonesian properly. But not Chinese. So, how we manage this need?

We are living in a remote area, although some villagers can speak Chinese, but there’s nothing such a Chinese course, and if I ask them to teach, I’m not sure they can teach my son properly, because they don’t understand about the step-by-step in teaching Chinese language, they only can speak.

To manage our needs, I use online Chinese learning. There are so many choices out there, how to choose the right one?

First, I choose the curriculum that begin from basic. If the curriculum teach something that is hard to be understand at the beginning, I left them. However, learning should be step-by-step from the easiest until the hardest.

Second, I choose the curriculum that teach how to pronounce the words or sentences. Ideally, choose curriculum that providing audio to learn pronounciation. This is very important in learning foreign language. But we are so lucky that we have two native speakers in our neighbourhood, they come from China and can speak Indonesian. We can learn Chinese pronounciation with them.

Third, since Chinese also about writing special characters, choose curriculum that will guide you to learn the right strokes, not only about to read the characters, but mainly how to write them correctly.

Fourth, choose curriculum that allow you to learn at your own pace. This is to lowering your stress.

With those consideration, I choose to learn Chinese from two websites:
Learn Chinese Online  
Clear Chinese 

Learn Chinese Online is good to learn about the meaning of the words and sentences. It also have good step-by-step curriculum. And it has audio materials to learn the pronounciations. I like it! But this website doesn’t have latin characters of how to write the words, the latin characters are only for the sounds or how to read the words. Since I consider this website as the best free to learn Chinese, I manage our needs of learning the latin characters from Google Translate. If this website provides the latin characters to learn how to write the words correctly, it will be perfect!

The appearance of Learn Chinese Online. The "Chinese" part is showing how to read the words, not to write the words in latin characters

This is from Google Translate, showing how to write the words "Ni Hao" in latin characters

I got the Clear Chinese URL from my friend that care about how my son learn Chinese characters. From this website we learn about Chinese strokes and characters. This website is a good choice, because from this website my son learn better to write Chinese characters. This website also have many more Chinese learning materials, including audio. By these websites we learn Chinese in frugal way.

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