Sweet Note Learning » Sagebooks 基礎漢字500 Review

A review of Sagebooks (基礎漢字500) from a non-native Chinese speaker teaching my kids to read in Cantonese.

Sagebooks is a popular Chinese level reader among oversea families. It is the only Chinese level reader that is bilingual! Not bilingual in the sense that it will teach your child how to read in both languages. Bilingual in the sense that there is instructions, resources and translations of the text provided in both English and Chinese. I believe this is the key feature that drives oversea families to this particular Chinese level book. For many of us, we are learning to read Chinese characters with our children and that added safe guard gives us the courage and confidence to teach our children how to read Chinese characters.

Overview of Sagebooks 基礎漢字500

The “Sage Formula” Basic Chinese 500 is a method specially developed and formulated for young children to learn Chinese. It was developed by Lucia Lau, a Montessori Early Childhood Educator in Hong Kong. The series is divided into 5 sets – beginning (blue), budding (green), building (orange), confident (pink) and fluent (red). Each set contains 5 books, 20 characters each to make a total of 500 characters for all 5 sets. Each lesson introduces 1 character at a time and builds upon previous lessons. It utilizes a spaced repetition approach to build a foundation and understanding of each character.

The Quick Review

Pros:

short lessons that can take 5-10 minutes (in theory)
each lesson builds on previous lessons, no surprise characters
spaced repetition
Cantonese and Mandarin audio available
traditional Chinese or simplified Chinese options
English translations to ensure understanding

Cons:

expensive
no story line
simple drawings
not engaging
pinyin and English can be a clutch for some learners who won’t learn the Chinese characters
MP3 audio download no longer available
audio available on app which doesn’t always work
errors in the books*

*Errors include – text missing from the page, incorrect pinyin, graphics to learn characters not matching, incorrect English spelling. There is a newer version available. I am unable to confirm that all these errors are fixed or not.

Sagebooks Lessons

Sagebooks recommends doing one lesson (one character) a day, which is what I did with my kids. Occasionally we would do more than one, but that’s only if they were eager to do more. Each lesson follows a predictable format: lesson number, lesson title, target character and five single line sentences. This format is consistent between all 500 lessons.

For our lessons, we would learn the target character and trace the target character following the stroke order on the page using a finger or a reading pen. Then for the reading lines, there are a few ways how my kids would approach each lesson.

They can:

1. try to read each character on their own without any audio assistance

2. listen to the audio of each line first, then read and repeat afterwards

3. try to read each character and when they are stuck, they can listen to the audio to learn the character.

Each lesson should take around 5 to 10 minutes. But to be honest, there are many days where it takes much longer than this because the kids fight the lessons. They don’t want to do it. The readings are not interesting. There is little intrinsic motivation. It can take longer than one lesson to get the character into long-term memory which makes reading a challenge. The pinyin and English translations can be a distraction and clutch if your child can already read. So, although the lessons are designed to be short, it can take much longer to complete.

For our lessons, I did not review previous characters or supplement with any writing worksheets. For our family’s level reading time, we stuck solely to one lesson a day and that was it. However, we did have our daily read alouds with picture books. I pointed out words that they were learning in Sagebooks. We also did other fun activities to learn Chinese characters. These activities were not directly related to Sagebooks, but many of the characters were also in Sagebooks even if we weren’t learning them at the time.

Child Sagebook Lesson

How Long Does it Take to Finish Sagebook?

If you follow the guideline of doing one lesson a day, Sagebooks should be completed within the 1.5 to 2 years mark. My oldest daughter started with the blue beginner just a few months of turning 4 years old. She finished the red fluent set when she was 5 years 6 months. My youngest daughter started with the blue beginner set when she was 2 years old and took a long hiatus from Sagebooks over the years. She is currently 7 years old, and is still working through the pink confident set.

Our Experience

I remembering first opening our blue beginner set of Sagebooks completely flustered on what to do with these books. My first mistake with these books was trying to treat these like picture books. They are definitely not picture book material. I read them to my daughter (3 years old) chapters at a time, looking up the jyutping/yale pronunciation for each character as it was introduced. By the time I finished the green set, we did not retain many characters. I thought we wasted our money on this set!

Fast forward with the help from our good friend Eveline, we tried again. This time I had my daughter (4 years old) point at the words as she read. We did one chapter at a time. We also talked about the meaning of the words and sentences in English, as Chinese is not my first language. We made it through the blue beginner and green budding set within a a few months, and retained 80% of the characters by the end of the green set.

After we finished the green budding set, I thought it was time to buy the whole set. I had previously bought only the blue and green sets from Eveline. And I am so thankful for Eveline and Charing who was able to sell me just the orange to red set and saving me the hassle of buying a complete set and selling off the blue and green set.

At the orange building set is where we started having difficulty again. We just weren’t retaining the characters anymore. I was still looking up the jyutping/yale pronunciation during each lesson. My daughter was getting discouraged and also said that she did not enjoy the pictures of the stories. We were going no where. The constant struggle wasn’t worth it at that time so we took a break from Sagebooks for a few months.

Sagebook Review by Non Fluent Chinese Family

The audio was always available. I did not use the audio at the beginning because the audio that Sagebooks provided was divided by books which meant I had to scan the audio to find the right chapter. A tedious task. The app* also never worked at that time. During our break from Sagebooks, I learned about the Chameleon Reader from Charing. I saw that she had stickered each page and recorded the audio for each page for her child to listen and read Sagebooks. Of course, I jumped on this wagon too. I downloaded all the audio for Sagebooks and split them up into chapters. I stickered each lesson with one sticker for my child and I waited for us to start it up again.

We actually skipped some of the orange building set and went straight to the pink confident set. This was my child’s choice. There was something in the orange building set that put my daughter off. It did not matter since we had the audio at hand. My daughter was able to independently listen to the audio and followed along. She was able to catch up on the characters she missed. The lessons went much smoother after we introduced the audio. With the help of the audio, my daughter was able to finish the red fluent set by the time she was 5 years 6 months. It took us a little over 18 months to get through it. She was very proud when she finished Sagebooks.

It was definitely not smooth sailing going through the entire set. We had our bumps and hiccups. There were definitely days where lessons were more of a struggle than others.

Every child’s experience will be different with these level readers. My second daughter is still going through Sagebooks and I can say that we are having much more bumps and hiccups with my second daughter. Her lessons goes well over the 10 minutes. Sometimes its because of her resistance and sometimes its because she is finding her own ways to make the stories and lessons more engaging. After finishing Sagebooks, my first daughter grew an appreciation for it. She knows it helped her learn how to read Chinese. She says she enjoyed the set (although I don’t think she would have said that while we were completing them). I will see how my second daughter feels at the end of this journey, whenever we get there.

Sample Pages

Below are sample pages from each set. Swipe to see more pages from each set. You can see the lessons follow the same format for each book and that the text always has just one line per page.

Sagebook Level 1 Book

The Sagebooks App

At the time when my family was completing Sagebooks, the app was not working. I have tested their new app, and the app does work. You can access the audio for each chapter by scanning the QR code in the book with their app (apple store link and android link). The QR code will take you straight to the lesson’s audio where you can play the audio one page at a time or automatically set it to play the audio two times in a row.

To use the Sagebooks app, first create an account. You have the option to navigate the app in English, traditional Chinese or simplified Chinese. You can create a profile for each child on one account. Your child can record their voice reading the lesson (one audio recording per lesson) and they can also take a photo (one photo per lesson).

Final Thoughts

As a second generation Chinese living in Canada with very little knowledge of the written Chinese language, I did find Sagebooks helpful. I like the structure format of introducing one character at a time and the short lessons. This set structure along with the English translations helped myself learn how to read which helped me teach my daughter how to read. My child was not reading English at the time when we started Sage, so it was not a distraction for us. The audio was extremely helpful and imperative for our family’s success! Without it, I don’t think we would have completed the 500 characters. If I had the choice to do it all over again, I would still choose Sagebooks.

Please note, even after learning 500 Chinese characters, our journey reading books after Sagebooks still had it bumps. Sagebooks built the foundation for reading but there was still much more to learn. I will save that for another post.

Child finished Sagebook Series

Where to Purchase these Level Readers

I purchased Sagebooks in Canada from Rhythm ‘N’ Rhyme/Yuto and Little Kozzi. I will leave direct links to other places to purchase these books down below.

Sagebooks

Canada: Yuto (Vancouver, BC), Little Kozzi (Toronto, ON), Book Treasures (Markham, ON)
USA: Gloria’s Bookstore, Be Joyful Mart
Hong Kong (directly from publisher): Sagebooks

Sagebooks Additional Resources

There are more resources available on Sagebooks official website and store. There are also other fellow mom bloggers who have created additional resources to supplement these lessons. The only one that I personally used from the list below is Guavarama’s 100 charts for Sagebooks to track my kids progress. I printed the 100 charts and we highlighted the characters that my kids were confident that they knew. They enjoyed seeing their progress and visually seeing how many characters they know. If you are into flashcards and writing, check out these resources.

Other Bloggers’ Experiences

If you want to read more about other bloggers’ experiences with Sagebooks, click the respective link to be directed to their blog post.

And that is a wrap on this post. Check out my blog post about learning to read with Little Bean Cantonese and my post on tips and how to get started reading in Chinese. I may also write a post about Greenfield, Lele Chinese Learning System, and 4, 5 Quick Read. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions about learning to read with Sagebooks. You can drop a question in the comments, email me or message me on instagram.

Sagebooks 基礎漢字500 Review

Quick Links

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Sagebooks