Learning Chinese Under Duress

I have been trying to impress on Beth the beauty, elegance and wisdom of 华语, to little avail.

She wants me to tutor her one-on-one next year so she doesn't have to go for the weekly three-hour session at Werribee Chinese School.

So today, we watched a DVD that teaches, in 5-min sessions, the word structure of commonly used words.

一人大
二人天
日月明
小大天

The first two characters add up to form the third.

With a bit of imagination and the right graphics/animation, it's easy for a beginner to remember what the word means.

Beth writes down the 汉语拼音, which she is quite good at now, and (with great effort) copies the chinese characters.

The plan is to do one segment a week with 听写 and eventually 默写.

Side note:

I wish the school would get a professional, keyword-search-optimized website that shows up immediately in search engines, instead of the 'free' sites it now uses. I keyed in 'werribee chinese school' into Google (how much more specific can you get?), and the school didn't show up even after page 5! I gave up searching after that, and had to fall back on the latest Principal's Report for the site URL. And that cheesy Congratulations banner at the top that screams Spam/Virus/Hype... Definitely room for improvement there.

Maybe I should talk to them about how SBI! can help...