Though I had studied Mandarin first in high school, I wrote our flagship storybook, the book that started it all, after graduating from my BA in Pacific and Asian Studies, China Concentration (UVic), because when I was studying Mandarin back then, I had been taken aback at how shocked people could be that I, a non-Chinese person, could possibly grapple with learning (gasp!) Mandarin Chinese. 

People treat English and Mandarin as if they are on opposite ends of the universe from one another, and while it’s true they don’t have a common root language, as a student I noticed all kinds of similarities between English and Mandarin that made Mandarin easier for me to understand, which offered me an on-ramp to the “Mandarin mentality” I’d need to adopt in order to learn to speak and understand it.

From my experience as a student grew my dream of creating books that would demystify Mandarin for native English speakers and make it easier for native Mandarin speaking expats to maintain their mother-tongue as their child's first or second language. I figured if I could show more people how second language acquisition could actually be possible for them, little pockets of the world would become more inclusive, and that would be a good thing. 

I believe parents and guardians shouldn’t have to be bilingual themselves in order to be able to introduce their children to a second or additional language, so that is how our unique and proprietary Text Scaffolding system of presenting Mandarin and English text within a storybook was born (explainer video is here!). As I embarked on a career in ESL teaching, I began to see a way to organize the text in my storybooks that would allow Mandarin-and-English speaking couples who are trying to learn their partners’ mother tongue to both read to their child, even at the same time from the same book, and be able to see similarities between their two languages. Text Scaffolding is now used in all Little Crab Educational Press storybooks. 

After years of being a certified ESL teacher and later taking the Curriculum and Modern Languages course at UBC with the then-goal of becoming a public high school Mandarin teacher, fast forward to the Covid-19 pandemic and the opportunity arose to join forces with my sister Lisa, a designer and an active French learner. Together we have developed Little Crab Educational Press into what it is today, a publishing company that produces “Resources for Teaching and Learning Languages Made with 快乐 (Joy!)”.

Click Our Little Shop in the menu above to peruse our storybooks, guided journals, digital downloads, signature puzzle books, and more - whether you are Beginning Chinese, or are at a level of Intermediate and Advanced Chinese - and discover the best way to learn a language in Sandy Suggests.

-Rebecca (Author and LCEP Founder)