Miss J- Chinese language teacher

Today, J says she really likes learning Chinese. It came so out of the blue that I didn't totally understand what she meant. Then this afternoon, she was teaching Prime lessons from her old book and I suddenly understand what she meant this morning.

Now she knows if she knows something, she can teach it and that in itself is good gauge of her own level of mastery. She came over, super excited and tells me Prime knows his stuff. Then Prime demonstrate to me what he learned with J cheering him on the side happily. This also motivated her to keep on learning Chinese herself so she will always have something to be able to teach Prime.

We use both an immersion and a formal approach to learning Chinese. The immersion is for common every day conversation . The first goal is for the children to understand mandarin Chinese and then to being able to carry a simple conversation with other people who speak Chinese.

The formal (dialogue) approach targets on the reading, ping-ying (similar to phonics- tells you how to pronounce the Chinese character precisely), and recognition of the Chinese character simultaneously. This gives them the ability to be able learn Chinese by themselves like J currently is able to- to a certain degree. The dialogue in the text also gives me more ideas of what to work with them esp. certain sentence structures not common in my every day conversation with them. For now, we only work on this about 5-10 minutes every day.

We also allow them to watch Chinese TV whenever they want (limited to 1 episode per day) but they don't always choose that actually. Lately, they are more likely to chose watching Discovery channel. The goal of watching Chinese TV is so that they are familiar with how other people speak Chinese and not always just hearing mommy speak Chinese. This also give them some vocabulary that I don't use nor found in the textbooks.