Bilingual Chinese English Montessori Grammar Symbols

Finally! After so many years, I’m really ready to teach my kids Chinese grammar.

Really!

So of course I spend days researching Chinese grammar parts of speech and talking to my sister, who majored in linguistics and had to take some Chinese grammar class. Speaking of linguists, don’t ever talk to them about grammar, it made my head hurt.

Who knows how much this will get used in our classroom but hey, at least now I know what Chinese grammar is mostly about. I made 4 different charts for lower elementary. And just 2 charts for upper elementary.

• Lower Elementary Bilingual Grammar Symbols Charts
• Upper Elementary Advanced Bilingual Grammar Symbols Charts

What are Montessori Grammar Symbols?

Since Montessori likes to go from the concrete to the abstract in presentation of any concept, she made some grammar symbols to go with her presentations. They’re super duper ultra cool in my opinion.

For example, a noun is represented by a black pyramid because it’s ancient and stable. Adjectives, articles, and pronouns are various sizes and colors of pyramid because they’re all related to the noun.

A verb on the other hand is a red ball, because a verb is an action! And of course, an adverb is also a ball, albeit smaller and orange color, because it modifies a verb typically.

Isn’t it cool?

So How do You Teach It?

Montessori Grammar Farm

If your have a kid from 3-7, you can use the Montessori Grammar Farm to teach them the parts of speech. This provides a concrete, hands on experience on what is a noun, verb, etc. I believe that generally grammar parts of speech is taught around 5.

Because we delayed English and I didn’t really know Chinese grammar parts of speech, we skipped the grammar farms.

When I taught Thumper in second and third grade, she got the key experiences in my album within 5 minutes. So I followed up with worksheet exercises from Evan Moor, Kiss Grammar, NAMC or Montessori For Everyone. She completed them easily, but if I were to ask her a month later, she can’t recall.

Start with a Grammar Symbol Story to Invoke their Interest

In fourth grade, since Astroboy also needed grammar lessons, I re-presented the lessons.

This time, I started with a story from The Deep Well of Time by Michael Dorer, which I highly recommend. It has a whole section on various parts of speech stories.

I still remember the story on adjectives! It was complicated as it listed all 6 types of adjectives. And as Thumper is a very auditory learner, she remembered them as well weeks later.

Practice by Labeling Sentences with Grammar Symbols

As I mentioned, I realized that what Thumper needed was a bit of repetitive work, one that spanned semesters, that doesn’t appear to be repetitive and was more varied than the canned and simple exercises that often follow a presentation.

This was one lesson I learned in teaching grammar. The hard part about parts of speech isn’t the concept, it’s in identifying them in practice. You may correctly identify adjectives 95% of the time, but then you encounter a word like once, and it forces you to recall the complete definition of adjectives again.

Or you hit a word that can act either as an adjective or adverb depending on what it’s modifying, and it forces you to relearn the definition of these parts of speech. But! These types of weird exceptions or difficult to identify words don’t appear in typical simple practice sentences.

We practiced by labeling our dictation sentences from Writing With Ease as WWE also teaches parts of speech in its dictation exercises. We got to practice identifying parts of speech over 6-8 months and this really helped in solidifying the concept.

In addition to whatever grammar concept WWE teaches in its dictation, we labeled all parts of speech week by week. For example, week one we revisited nouns. The kids would draw black pyramids over all the nouns. For week two, we’d learn about verbs, and she’d have to draw both noun and verb symbols over the words.

Eventually we worked up to all 8 parts of speech. When WWE 3 taught advanced grammar concepts such as direct objects, predicate nominatives, different types of nouns or verbs, we also pulled up the advanced grammar symbol charts and started drawing those in.

Along the way, both of us sometimes had to scratch our heads and Google to find out the parts of speech of some words. But I think, finally, through these long and consistent exercises, that Thumper has the concept down more. She loves drawing the symbols in and wanted to do them even though I told her we can stop now.

How do I Like the Montessori Grammar Symbols?

I highly recommend drawing grammar symbols as a way to learn parts of speech. For some reason, the children really get the idea better when they see a symbol instead of words like n., v. over words, which is what Kiss Grammar did.  It’s probably because of the ingenious way Montessori designed the symbols. Astroboy would forget sometimes what a verb is, but if I reminded him what does the red ball do, he’d remember.

On top of that, even though it’s not explicitly taught, eventually the kids realize the relationships between these parts of speech. For example, one day Thumper pointed out to me that the light small blue triangle (article) is always followed by the black triangle (noun). And we learned together that the green bridge (preposition) connects two black triangles (noun) together.

Knowing what symbols go together help the children see the relationships between words more easily.

Of course, for even younger children, they can use sentence strips and put concrete symbols on top. But honestly, I’m just way too lazy so I’m happy we moved straight onto drawing on paper.

So, What’s up with Chinese Grammar?

There is a lot of Chinese grammar info out there and everyone says something just a teeny tiny bit different. For example, one website high on Google search result says there are 8 major parts of speech, just like English. Others say there are 12. So the problem was figuring out what the Taiwanese elementary textbook says.

Additionally, because the kids are learning English and Chinese grammar at the same time, I didn’t want the grammar to be too different.

What do I mean by that? Did you know that 很 is a verb?!

I had this long discussion with my sister about how it is used as a verb…..a very special weird verb. Because you can say things like 我很好. In this instance, 很 is a verb….somehow. But I know that most people translate 很 as very, which means it’s an adjective. Plus, it acts like an adjective/adverb in most other instances, so what do you do?

My super non-linguist point of view is they just dropped the verb. Who says a sentence has to have a verb? That’s such an English grammar idea. But of course that’s not how linguists view it because of course linguists allow for all manners of grammar in all languages, says my sister. Except then this type of word now has some super nerdy linguistic term, not helpful for kids, who need some general idea and then dive into the exceptions and specifics when they’re older.

Ultimately I found this super great website which has a handy dandy table that explains the parts of speech succinctly. I think the level is just right for elementary kids. For adults, if you really want to get into it, you can check out the All Set Learning website, which divides Chinese grammar into HSK levels.

I designed my PDF files based on this website. Many of the basic concepts are the same, such as noun, verb, adjective. Here are the changes from English to Chinese Montessori grammar chart. (For those that can read Chinese, I highly recommend visiting the website, their chart is helpful for the teacher.)

There are 10 Chinese parts of speech kids can learn in lower elementary, just 2 more than English counterpart.

1.There’s no article in Chinese grammar

Articles are the words a, an, and the. This is the small light blue triangle in the grammar chart. There is no such thing in Chinese.

2. Addition of Measure Words as a major part of speech

Yes, in Chinese it’s not considered an adjective, but something totally separate. In English, counters like 1, 2, 3 are adjectives and measure words are nouns. In Chinese, they’re in a category of their own because the measure words are not nouns. So, the 個 in 一個 is not a noun!

My sister and I decided on the symbol of a cylinder (we wanted shapes that were from Montessori geometric shapes) because it’s kind of like a measuring cup. The website splits the measure words category into two. But to make it simple for elementary kids, I just use one category.

3. Addition of Particles

This is where my sister and I spent a lot of time discussing. Because particles are not that big of a deal in English. In fact, it’s not in the 8 major parts of speech in the Montessori albums. However, particles are big in Chinese grammar and they wear different hats.

So, what are particles? Particles are words like 的, which follows nouns and verbs: 他的，太陽的，跑得. They’re used to show time, like 睡了，吃過. Except Chinese has no concept of tenses like English but uses this concept called ‘aspect’. So particles are used to show aspect. Here’s how Chinese Boost defines it:

Tense is about when an action took place relative to now, when we’re speaking. Aspect is about the completeness of an action relative to when it took place. 

https://www.chineseboost.com/grammar/chinese-grammar-rules/

At this point maybe your head is probably swimming like I was and you start wondering, “Do I really need my kids to study grammar? Isn’t it better if they just become (near) native speakers and ‘get’ grammar implicitly”?

And you’re right, a lot of beginning grammar native speakers just get. They know it intuitively when you speak it. Lucky them. But I’ve noticed that with kids learning 2 languages with very different grammar structures, if one language is stronger, they tend to use the stronger language’s grammar when speaking the weak language.

Particles Chart

結構助詞	的、地、得
時態助詞	著、了、過
語氣助詞	嗎、吧、啊、呢

The PDF Files

Just a reminder that if you want to share the PDF files, please point people to my website or link to the URL. Please don’t just upload them into groups. This way people get the background info. I’m making two pages available. If you really want all Chinese or all English, please PM me.

I’m super excited that I finally, finally understand the parts of speech in Chinese and can use the Chinese terms. I’d love to know if you find them useful as well!

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