Well, Chinese reading is going well for both “Charlotte” and “Georgia”, a few months shy of 15 and 12 years of age respectively.

Charlotte just finished reading the Chinese edition of “Anna and the French Kiss” (4.5/5 score on Amazon), giggling intermittently as she read along.  Oh, all those teen romance!  She read some 70 pages this afternoon.  She did feel the need to skim through the English E-edition that she checked out from the online public library to get a better idea of the names and some of the details in the book.  So, her Chinese comprehension is not as precise as her English comprehension; but, that’s not a surprise.  She says reading it in Chinese gives her more room for imagination, LOL!  As long she keeps on reading, studying, and learning Chinese, her reading comprehension will come further along.

As for Georgia, she is now reading the first book of 金庸‘s “神雕俠侶“, about 9 months before Charlotte in terms of their age at the time of first time reading.  She needed a little help at the beginning, so I resorted to my good old fashion Scaffold Reading Experience and she read the first chapter with zhuyin assistance.  Now, she has moved back to the regular book.  I do try to sit close by at this point as she asks me questions about her reading from time to time.

So, I am quite excited about both of their progress!  I am certain some of your kids will reach these milestones at a younger age, as some of you utilize Chinese learning programs more rigorous than ours at a younger age.  Yeah, you probably would have considered my girls “slackers” in your household when they were younger, LOL!

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.