{"id":592,"date":"2011-07-02T22:34:31","date_gmt":"2011-07-03T02:34:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/?p=592"},"modified":"2011-07-12T22:47:20","modified_gmt":"2011-07-13T02:47:20","slug":"kai-lans-carnival-light-on-chinese-heavy-on-sap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/2011\/07\/kai-lans-carnival-light-on-chinese-heavy-on-sap\/","title":{"rendered":"Kai-Lan’s Carnival light on Chinese, heavy on sap"},"content":{"rendered":"

I suppose Ni Hao, Kai-Lan is the 800 pound gorilla in the English-Chinese bilingual space, but put me down for unimpressed after watching the first episode of this DVD, the titular “Kai-Lan’s Carnival<\/a>\"\".” The entire episode makes a serious effort to teach only one Chinese word, “l\u0101” (\u62c9), and a half-hearted run at teaching Chinese numbers. There’s also some fuzzy message about apologizing or something like that, which represents the biggest lost opportunity: the singing is all-English. Nothing helps stick words in your head like a good song, so why they didn’t even try to throw some Chinese in there baffles me. (They didn’t try teaching the Chinese equivalent of “I’m sorry,” either).<\/p>\n

The one thing I am impressed with so far about Ni Hao, Kai-Lan<\/em> is that it’s relatively calm and evenly paced (in sharp contrast to the seizure-inducing Yo Gabba Gabba). Kai Lan often pauses to ask the viewer what she thinks, and based on watching friends’ kids reactions, it’s a technique that works. Too bad most of the questions she asks in this episode have nothing to do with Chinese.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I suppose Ni Hao, Kai-Lan is the 800 pound gorilla in the English-Chinese bilingual space, but put me down for unimpressed after watching the first episode of this DVD, the titular “Kai-Lan’s Carnival.” The entire episode makes a serious effort … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":271,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44936],"tags":[44946,44947,44938,38],"class_list":["post-592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bilingual-english-chinese","tag-dvd","tag-kai-lan","tag-product-review","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":609,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions\/609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/anderkoo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}