Cotton-Pickin’ Days

oooh your blog looks so pretty now. i like the colors.

i used to be like your son. haha, i think i said the same things as him. i refused to speak in chinese with my dad because i could get away with it. you have to be very strict about it, i guess.

laurina aka yeh hai tz : There’s no way to force Stephen to speak Chinese with me but at the very least, I can make it part of his environment. Living in London doesn’t make it too easy, though! I already have teachers wondering if he’s speaking Chinese when they can’t understand what he’s saying. @#! Four-year-olds are already hard to understand without that mistaken assumption!

You’re going to have perfect Chinese by the time you leave Beijing. Way to go!!

In my experience, it’s very difficult for the parents to teach the kids another language at home. Kids really compartmentalize languages and they don’t want the lines to blur. Do you have a Chinese-speaking friend- then S could associate speaking Chinese with being with that friend. Or, bringing in a Chinese speaker as a play date once a week. I find that if there’s an option to speak english, they won’t learn it, but if they are left to sink-or-swim, even for an hour or two, they learn very quickly!

Also, DVDs are good for this! motivation!

BTW, at a family festival a few weeks ago I saw someone with a “chinese School of London” t-shirt on, so there must be one around here somewhere!

Good luck!

From a language acquisition perspective, just hearing it will make a difference in how easily he can in later life learn Chinese or another language. Not only that, but early exposure to other languages has been shown to make a difference in the amount of fluency you can attain when you learn a language as an older person. I am much too lazy to look up references. *g*

You could start by saying everything in Chinese, then English, and gradually stop translating it to English. He might get mad, but what 4 year old doesn’t get mad at Mom? heh. Mine gets mad a lot lately it seems. lol

I think you don’t need to worry yet, once he goes to chinese school he’ll pick it up in around 6 months. I think there’s such a lot of variation in the “english” that he hears at home and at school that it’s not worth trying to push anything. Meantime you can use chinese for saying things you don’t want him to understand, I’ll bet he knows chinese for sweeties or bedtime or whatever, in no time!

I’m so glad you have brought up the topic of teaching children a second language. I have been considering teaching Mack another language. I am taking Latin in school at the moment. It’s really a lot of fun, and I enjoy deconstructing sentences and assigning labels. Latin would not be an ideal language to teach Mack, just because it’s too confusing (declensions!) and it’s not exactly in wide use. I figured for home we could get one of those audio courses to learn Spanish together. (Spanish would be the logical choice, with the large percentage of Hispanic residents in the area.) Can you recommend a good set/series that works well for children? CDs that have accompanying books or flash cards would work, but for now we’d like to start with some basic audio.

It’s interesting to me that he already understands the difference between Chinese and English because one of the things I’ve read about bilingual households is that the kids sometimes don’t know which word belongs to which language and that’s why they code switch.

It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to ask for assistance from his grandparents, he might be more accepting of someone else speaking another language to him–he knows you can speak English. With us muddling our way through Japanese, initially I was just going to try and introduce new words in Japanese to Ivy, but it just confused her–she already knew something was a cat, and now I was telling her it was neko. She understands much better now that she has established that they are two different languages, although she does sometimes mix the two–she calls peaches momo and once we were listening to a song where someone sang “I wish I was heavy, heavy heavy heavy” and she thought he was saying I wish I was hebi–japanese for snake.

Do you know any kids who speak Chinese? That would really be the best scenario, I think, to put him in a situation where he is going to learn by playing with other kids.

Jill: DVD’s are the way to go. Stephen picked up some Spanish from Diego. The Chinese children’s DVD’s are way too poorly produced to be enjoyable viewing.

Deb: Sure I could but will I?

Snowy: You are always so sensible! I think I will try teaching him Chinese for the things he wants most.

jenmcd: I’ll do some research and also ask at the Play Library blog for you!

Donna: Sadly, we don’t know that many people here and the ones we know don’t speak Chinese. I should just hire myself a Chinese housekeeper and kill two birds with one stone. Haha!!

I am SO in the same boat as you, Hsien! Plus #1 got into Catholic High School which is very strong in Chinese. Maybe #1 might throttle me later on…

Jen: I’ve asked for help in this post at Play Library.

kachunknorge: I’m sure he will pick it up very easily!

Hsien: Thanks! I’ll keep an eye on responses to that post.