Little Bean Cantonese Review

A review of Little Bean Cantonese from a non-native Chinese speaker teaching my kids how to read Chinese in Cantonese.

Quick Links

• Overview of Little Bean Cantonese
• The Quick Review
• Little Bean Cantonese Lessons
• Sample Pages
• Our Experience
• Final Thoughts
• Where to Download

Overview of Little Bean Cantonese 小豆釘

Little Bean Cantonese is a project run by two certified teachers from Hong Kong who are now living overseas. Sophie and Nanz’s mission is to help oversea families teach their kids how to read Chinese. They have created a set of level readers, 40 volumes in total, to guide parents in teaching their children 400 Chinese characters through fun activities and stories.

The Quick Review

Pros:

• low cost – download for free or support LBC with monthly payments

• character introduction uses large Chinese characters with visual mnemonics, jyutping and rough English translation

• teaches character combinations to learn words or phrases with visual support

• a variety of fun age appropriate activities available in each volume

• engaging and humourous stories

• large font in initial volumes

• each lesson builds on previous lessons

• names of characters are underlined

• stories with lots of repetition

• teaches jyutping

• text gets progressively longer to build confidence, stamina and fluency

• learn about Hong Kong, games and other tidbits of information for adults (if you are a fluent reader in Chinese)

Cons:

• only available in digital form

• printing costs (especially in colour) can be costly

• no audio available for volume 1 to 30

• volumes 31 to 40 – some stories have very small text

• occasionally there are surprise characters – jyutping is provided in the text for those words

• resources, patreon and Facebook page is only in Chinese

Little Bean Cantonese Lessons

I started using Little Bean Cantonese magazines after both my children started/finished Sagebooks. They had a basic foundation for reading with the knowledge of more than 150+ Chinese characters. The way I conducted my lessons will be different than how a beginner reader would approach the magazine. We used these magazines to build my kids’ fluency, stamina and confidence in reading Chinese.

Each magazine volume starts with 10 new characters. The characters are shown with a big font, a visual mnemonic, jyutping Cantonese pronunciation and a rough English translation. I review these characters before starting the activities and reading. Most characters my kids have familiarity with already before the lesson.

In the earlier volumes (volume 1-10), the activities precedes the stories. The activities are fun and short. The stories are 1 to 2 pages long with a large picture and large text. Sometimes I let the kids do one or two activities and then we read one of the stories. Sometimes I also get the kids to read the story first and then let them do the activities as a reward for reading the story. The kids have their favourite activities, so I plan according to which activity they want to do. If it’s a maze, I get them to read first. If it’s matching characters to words, I get them to do the activity first and then the story. Completing a full magazine would take several days.

For later volumes (11-20), the story precedes the activities. We would start with the 10 characters first to check for new characters. Then we would go through one story and then one or more activities. Each volume contains 3 to 5 stories and each story can range from 1 to 3 pages in length. We typically only do one page of a story a day. The kids can choose to do as many activities they like within any of the volumes. I don’t restrict them to the current volume that we are working on. Completion of a full magazine would take a week or longer

For volumes 21-40, the stories are much longer. There are also less activities starting around volume 30. One story spans from 2 to 4 pages in length. My daughter would read 1 page of a story per day and continue the story the next time. We do talk about the story after she completed it to double check for understanding. This was done in English for our family. We did not do Little Bean Cantonese daily at this point. Completion of a full magazine could take over a month.

There are the pages called “Mix and Match” that teaches words or short phrases. I believe this was supposed to be cut out and used as a hands on game or activity. However, since I printed the magazines into booklets, I did not cut them out. We rarely used these pages. If there was a new word or phrase that my child didn’t know I would point it out and talk about it. Otherwise, these pages were not used.

Sample Pages

Below are sample pages from Little Bean Cantonese magazines. Little Bean’s magazines are available in full colour! To save on costs, I had them printed in black and white, and coiled together to create a booklet of 10 magazines together at my local printer shop.

Character Introduction

There are 10 characters introduced per magazine. The characters are displayed in a big clear font with a visual mnemonic, jyutping and a rough English translation. This is consistent between all 40 magazines. It is followed by one or two pages of “Mix & Match” and/or “Memory Game” to teach words or short phrases. Children will learn 9 to 20 words or phrases on these pages per magazine.

The Stories

In the early magazines, the font for the stories are very large. Stories are 1 to 2 pages in length and there are 2 to 5 stories per magazine. As your child progresses through the magazines, the length of the stories will grow to 1 to 4 pages in length and the font size will get smaller as more text is added.

The stories are repetitive to build confidence and help learn the Chinese characters. The stories move from single sentences to short paragraphs and then to longer paragraphs. Sophie and Nanz include a variety of stories in their later volumes which include paragraphs reading and also comic reading with speech bubbles. The stories are engaging and humourous!

The Activities

In each magazine there are about 3 to five fun activities for kids to complete to learn the Chinese characters. These activities include: matching, circling, drawing, mazes, word searches, fill in the blanks, spot the difference and more. These are my kids favourite part of Little Bean Cantonese.

Learning about Jyutping and Radicals

From volume 11 to 40, there are short rhyming poems to learn jyutping. From volume 31 to 40, one radical is introduced with example characters and the jyutping for those characters.

Our Experience

My kids started reading Little Bean Magazines when they were 4 and 5 years old. My oldest had already finished Sagebooks. My youngest had started Sagebooks and had a character count of 150 to 200 characters. We did not start these magazines with a blank slate so our experience may be different than yours if you are starting from scratch. I used Little Bean Cantonese magazines to build reading stamina and fluency for my kids. There are a lot of overlap characters between Sagebook and Little Bean Cantonese. There are also some new characters that were not introduced in Sagebooks. My 5 year old started on volume 11 while my 4 year old started on volume 1.

I sent the pdf files to a local print shop to print the magazines into coil booklets. Each booklet contained 10 magazines. This saved me from having loose pages everywhere and it kept all the magazines in order. It also allowed me to give one entire booklet to each of my children so that they were not fighting for the magazines. Unfortunately with printing costs, I had to print in black and white. The cost to print in colour was triple the amount of a black and white print. There were some activities like spot the difference that required colour printing but for the most part, I did not see that the black and white print outs affected their reading or liking of the stories. They still very much enjoyed the stories.

Our initial experience was very fun. The kids LOVED all the activities in the magazines. They would do them over and over again. I used dry erase pocket sleeves over the pages with white board markers to allow the kids the chance to do it multiple times. The stories were simple and fun. Some were humourous and they would love reading them multiple times. There is a lot of repetition in the stories giving the kids many opportunities to learn the target characters. I would sometimes get the kids to read the text without the pictures or get them to draw their own pictures to check for their understanding. This was a fun activity to do and a great way to access their learning. They also practiced writing Chinese by copying the stories.

Each magazine is about 10 to 20 pages in length. It would take us a couple days to at least a week to complete one magazine. With the later volumes, it would take us much longer to finish the entire magazine.

As they progressed through the magazines, the story length started to increase. It started getting more challenging to complete one story in one sitting. We would read just one or sometimes two pages of the story per sitting depending on its length. In addition, starting volume 30, there are less activities. The stories were still lots of fun but my kids lack the focus level to read these on a daily basis as they were also attending full time school and had other extra curricular activities. The paragraphs of text was intimidating for them at 4 and 5 years old, even if they knew all the characters. We took a break from Little Bean for a few months. During this time, they would occasionally do the activities from the earlier magazines and we read other Chinese pictures books.

Fast forward to when my oldest was 7 years old, about 1.5 years since we started Little Bean Cantonese, she wanted to finish all the magazines. Because she had grown developmentally, she was able to tackle longer lengths of text. She was able to read 1 to 2 pages of full page text in Chinese. And now she is all done! After almost 2 year of Little Bean Cantonese, it has really built her confidence in reading Chinese books. I feel much more confident tackling bridge books after finishing Little Bean Cantonese than I did after finishing Sagebooks.

Final Thoughts

I would highly recommend Little Bean Cantonese magazines to learn how to read Chinese because of it’s fun and visual approach to learning Chinese characters. We loved the stories and the kids would read them over and over again! It does help to build a love for reading and does help build the stamina to read longer texts. I do thinks volumes 30-40 are better suited for a child that is closer to 7 years old or older.

If I were to start from complete scratch though, as a non-native reader and speaker, I can imagine it being challenging getting through some of the texts without any audio. The audio was necessary for my family to complete Sagebooks. It definitely would be a different experience with a different learning curve navigating this system without some Chinese knowledge. There is jyutping in the character introduction, but I still highly suggest listening to how the word should sound.

I believe that Sophie and Nanz introduced the characters in a very strategic way by starting with concrete characters first that can act alone as words. The first 10 volumes included stories that were easy to decode and visualize, especially as someone who is not a native Chinese speaker. The characters were simple that if you knew the English translation of each individual character, you could figure out the meaning of the Chinese sentences.

The later volumes do get challenging. There is only a rough translation of individual characters. There is no English in the stories. However they do have great illustrations to help understand the stories. I still had to look up things every so often to make sure the kids and I clearly understood the stories. Learning to read in Chinese takes practice!

If you are a complete beginner still building Chinese knowledge, I would do these very slowly taking the time to learn and understand everything as a parent so that you can better support your child. Although they are fun, they are not easy level readers. This level reader worked perfectly for us after finishing Sagebooks. Take it slow and enjoy the journey!

These magazines were definitely targeted to oversea families who are fluent in Chinese, speaking and reading. Their patreon, Facebook page, and resources are written all in Chinese with no English translations. I had to google translate many of their posts to understand the messages they wanted to share. However, if there is a will, there is a way. We managed to complete these despite me being a parent who is not a native speaker and my children who are learning Cantonese as a second language.

Where to Download Little Bean Cantonese

These magazines can be downloaded for free on their Patreon page. There are more writing activities, games and character learning activities that can be downloaded if you join their Patreon. Little Bean Cantonese also conduct virtual live classes on Zoom. You can find more information about their classes and their thoughts on Chinese learning on their website.

www.littlebeancantonese.com

contact: sweetnotelearning@gmail.com