Let’s see.  What are we up to lately, with their Chinese….

Over the Christmas break, “Charlotte”, DD#1 at 14 years of age, “Georgia”, DD#2 at 11 years of age, and I got to spend a lot of time talking about family values, in Chinese of course.  In fact, I set aside about an hour a day to do so over their two weeks’ break.

Charlotte finished reading the Chinese edition of “My Sister’s Keeper” recently.  She has moved onto “Anna and the French Kiss” by Stephanie Perkins.  The translated names of the various localities give her some trouble but that’s about it, she says.  Let’s hope she is right about that.

Charlotte is also working on singing and playing (guitar) right the song “朋友“ or “Friends”  by 周華健.  Here is a small part of her practice:

As for Georgia, besides her Chinese lessons, she continues to read the books in the “世界少年文學精選“ series.  I don’t mind that she continues to read books with zhuyin, to broaden her vocabulary and content exposure further.  My estimate is that she reads about 500 characters a minutes, which means that she probably can read similar books without zhuyin at about 250 characters a minutes.  She continues to watch a popular 2016 Chinese TV drama, 女醫明妃傳, though she loves to watch the American TV show “Fresh Off the Boat” every now and then.

The two of them continue to converse in Chinese at home, about 80% of the time.