Learning mandarin

Little J goes for Chinese lessons. I'm trying to remember when exactly, but it was one fateful evening where I discovered he had knowledge and vocabulary of mandarin at a standard of like, I don't know, sub-zero. Why? Because we do not speak much of it at home and he only knows (broken) English. Sigh.


So, learning from K who is our first-child-experiment, we enrolled him in class. I forgot when we started exactly, but it was probably about a year+ ago; as I discovered our routine from this post of our Saturday routine last year.


The lessons have paid off, and it is so amazing and I feel so proud to observe this boy display his knowledge of mandarin in conversation (still sometimes broken) and more superbly, his ability to identify Chinese words. Love it! We try to revise with him at least once a week, and he has truly accumulated a lot of words.

Revision time

He is pretty good and knows the words like, 90% and now we try to have him form sentences to reinforce his understanding of words.


Just for fun, here's sharing some funny sentences J has formed:

• 他去桌子 - he's probably thinking 'he went to the table' but we had to tell him it's a fragmented sentence that doesn't work on its own.
• 我看桌子 - 'I see the table' - again, a fragmented sentence!
• 我去运动公园 - 'I went to exercise at the park' - literally. Had to switch his sentence structure; though honestly this is such a common problem that we face even in adults (uh, me)
• 我看到五颜六色 - J thinks that 五颜六色 is 'a rainbow' - get it? He's forming 'I saw a rainbow' in this sentence! Had to educate him that the phrase means as colourful as a rainbow, but how he's used it is not right.
  
  

His sentences are pretty funny sometimes, but he will get better and it's all in the fun of learning and improving!


Little K is also on an uphill journey to improve her mandarin. Her advantage with the language is that she was exposed to it younger, though with no formal lessons. Her conversational mandarin is great but the theory of the language is a challenge.


Her struggle this year also includes hanyu pinyin which has been quite a feat. She has improved though which is great, but there is still a fair way to go. Her ability to recognise Chinese words is also a constant challenge; and truly, I don't blame her. It is not easy especially given that we do not practise enough.


So, on this learning journey we keep going!