Author: 人生

Education does not equate schooling

人生 Daily thoughts ,

Other thoughts for the day

I just spoke with another parent on my way back from work. Here are highlights of some of the points that I had not discussed before.

1) Education is the most important thing (well, besides the usual talk of wanting your kids to be happy and that sort of things). Schooling is a mean to the end. Education is SO much more than schooling. When schooling interferes with education, go see about switching school.

2) When weekend Chinese school (or immersion school for that matter) interferes with your kids’ Chinese education, such as focusing way too much on writing and testing, and you have a viable alternative such as home instruction, drop weekend Chinese school. Neither its scope nor curriculum is sufficient for level 3 proficiency and up any ways. A lot more is required. And if you DO do the “a lot more” part at home, you may figure out that you can be better off with home instruction.

3) Testing. I had never given my daughters any Chinese test. When we homeschooled, it seems the au pair did give them tests, but there were pretty much no stress involved, according to my kids. I didn’t know that they even had tests till just now. Why bother with test on Chinese at this age, as a Chinese-speaking heritage family? The language skill is for long term practical use, amongst other things. Test results means nothing, if one can’t speak competently or read a book. We just keep focusing on learning more and more and do more reading and conversing. There is no required pre-defined and adhered-to schedule to keep. Every day and every moment is a teaching opportunity.

4) Learning together. Here in the US, besides independent reading and watching Chinese cartoons, my daughters pretty much did all their Chinese learning with the au pairs, tutors, or me next to them. If I can manage to get some patient chart work done while they study, I try to do so, but I am there to help and guide them every step of the way. Sometimes, I would tell them to copy the text or do some reading comprehension exercises while I take a nap or something like that, but that’s infrequent. We watch all these funny Chinese YouTube videos and movies together. This allows the three of us to be our own CLE (Chinese language ecosystem), that we can retell jokes and stories months later. WE ARE OUR OWN CLIQUE and we have fun together.

5) Time spent with other heritage kids after 6-8 years of age is unlikely to improve much your children’s Chinese proficiency, since they almost always speak English to each other.  It may help solidifying your children’s identity but not so much Chinese.

Scheduling

人生 Daily thoughts

Due to increased school work for my fifth grader, our main scheduled Chinese lessons are now reduced to Saturday or Sunday mornings, consisting of 45 minutes of reading aloud, 45 minutes of writing practice, and 45 minutes of karaoke singing.  My younger daughter has less homework as a third grader, so I give her Chinese lessons to work on weekday evenings IF she is done with school work.

However, to me, these short “formal” Chinese school work are only half of the story.  Since their Chinese are fairly good already and they grew up surrounded by Chinese environment, they are learning by osmosis also.  They listen to Chinese pop music (iPod shuffle, no screen to distract them), sing Chinese pop songs (and a few English ones) while riding in the car, watch Chinese soap opera and cartoons in Chinese on some mornings and evenings during the week and on weekends, and read Chinese comics and books (novels, story books) with and without zhuyin.  All these other things, they do it WILLINGLY and EAGERLY for FUN.  Not that Jay Chou’s Chinese pronunciation is good, but all these other things make Chineserelevant, which to me, is one of the most important and difficult aspect of such bilingual upbringing.

So, that’s why I think it is CRITICAL to get the children’s colloquial AND formal Chinese to decent level of fluency early on (by 7-8), before other things in their life take more priority, so that they will ENJOY these other aspects of Chinese.  Otherwise, parents like us are just fighting a loosing battle.

Many parents have children whose Chinese is not strong enough, thus speaking more and more English, shunting Chinese home work, or not interested in extracurricular reading of books in Chinese.  Since the rate of improvement in the Chinese of children of Chinese heritage almost always lags behind that of English, the situation is likely to get worse.  I suggest that the parents perform a jump start in their Chinese program, if their resource allows.  This would typically take the form of an extended immersion trip where the children gets formal instructions in Chinese and daily exposure to peers and people of various age group and background who speak Chinese to them.  The required length of these trips obviously depends on the level of the children’s Chinese.  For my children, I think 6 to 8 weeks a year is good enough.  For children whose Chinese is very rudimentary, it may take up to a couple of years.

I hope this helps.

Real time speech to speech English to Chinese translation

人生 Daily thoughts

This is Microsoft’s English to Chinese speech to speech translation technology in 2012. Start at 7:30 min and listen for yourself.  You will be amazed.  In 10-20 years, technologies like this may make it more difficult to justify most “casual” Chinese (or most second language) learning. Unless the goal is to achieve near native level fluency, most language learners probably have better return on investment with their time learning other things.
https://youtu.be/Nu-nlQqFCKg

On the transient effect of language immersion trips at young age

人生 Daily thoughts

For several years, my daughters used to spend about 2 months with their grandparents in Taiwan twice a year, where they attended local preschool. So, they would have about four months’ gap in between their trip. One time, after about three months went by back in the US, my elder daughter, who was probably in kindergarten or first grade by then, started to slip in more and more English at home and we had to keep reminding her to speak Chinese only. I said to myself then, “yap, it is about time for them to go back.” The effect of the previous immersion trip started to wear off by then (~ 3 months), despite speaking Chinese only at home and taking Chinese lessons at home about 5 days a week.
As she grew older and her knowledge of Chinese solidified further with more lessons and exposure to Chinese pop music, cartoons, movies, jokes, comedies, comics, etc., the effect of subsequent immersion trips lasted longer and longer. These days, my elder daughter is the Chinese language “police” at home, reminding her younger sister to speak Chinese if she slips in English.