Irvine based IQChinese and Hope Education Foundation of Monterey Park, CA announced today that they have provided 17 grants making high-tech courseware available to American students learning Mandarin Chinese in 17 public schools in 17 states.
According to IQChinese CEO, Steven Chen, “The opportunity to team with Hope Education Foundation and offer the ‘One State, One School’ Chinese Language Grant is a “win-win situation for both organizations and especially American students.” Hope Education Foundation is a non-profit organization whose goal is to provide opportunities for direct interaction between American and Chinese students and educators.
Chen commented, “The average American student has no idea about how to start learning Chinese.” “All they really know”, he said, “is that Chinese is really difficult”. The grant provides a complete Chinese language curriculum to one public school per state to either expand an existing Chinese program or provide materials to start a new one. Each grant provides courseware for up to 30 school computers, training and resources for three classroom teachers, as well as individual student courseware for up to 100 students, allowing them to practice outside of the classroom at home. Each grant is valued at more than $10,000.
Chen stated the reason so many American kids love to use IQChinese courseware is because, “It makes learning fun and brings something considered so difficult down to a very familiar environment...the computer.” Chen said most American kids are already communicating daily via text messaging and other instant messaging formats and then asked, “why not let them use the same format to learn Chinese?” Traditionally, Chinese has been taught only using rote memorization of individual characters and complicated stroke orders. Without an alphabet, typing nearly 50,000 different Chinese characters on a computer seemed like an impossible task.
The IQChinese courseware utilizes a standard computer and keyboard. Students are introduced to Chinese characters in a musical format similar to a chant. Once they gain a basic idea of a character’s sound and one of five different tones, students then type the sound using ABCs and select a number on the keyboard between one and five to represent the appropriate tone. If typed correctly, the student will receive instant confirmation with the spoken sound of the character in a human Chinese voice and the visual of the character. Chen reiterated his enthusiasm for helping American kids learn Chinese by pointing out most American parents have zero exposure to Mandarin Chinese and therefore cannot assist with their children’s Chinese homework. He said, this speak aloud function of the courseware is “indispensible”
The seventeen schools that will be receiving grants cut a broad swath across America including, Hawaii, New York, Wisconsin and New Mexico. Chen said both IQChinese and Hope Education Foundation hope to provide Chinese language grants to all 50 states next year.
