Over the weekend, I had a chance to sit down for a forum with Fiona Walker, Principal Director of Julia Gabriel, Huang Ying, their Head of Mandarin and several other parents over some mini sandwiches at The Pines. We were supposed to talk about how to help our kids learn Mandarin, a topic that I’ve been refusing to touch with a ten foot pole. But you know me, any chance to sit down for a smoothie without the kids and I’m totally game.
Ever since the kids were born, I’ve been determining my success as a parent by whether or not they survived the day without losing a limb. If both kids were still in one piece by nightfall, it was time to pop the champagne and celebrate.
Seriously, who’s got time to think about things like education, much less in Mandarin.
Besides, the husband and I, we’re not Mandarin people. I mean, we’re Chinese, but it’s a matter of ethnicity rather than conversational ability. Thanks to the gahmen’s successful Speak Mandarin campaign, we are conversant in the language but we’ve been using it as a secret code whenever we don’t want Tru to pick up on what we’re saying. So we’re very good at those key words like “strawberries, yoghurt and cheese” but not much else. Also, we’ve never been very concerned about having them learn Mandarin because after all, we made it through much of our lives speaking mostly English.
Yes, there’s the whole issue of China’s meteoric rise as an economic powerhouse and how speaking Mandarin will be the secret to enormous wealth because you can now sell stuff to 1.3 billion people. But then again, I speak Mandarin and I’m already having trouble selling a muffin to the 70-year-old Aunty next door.
So we tend to find it hilarious rather than upsetting when Tru says his Chinese name with a weird accent. He’ll learn eventually and if he is never effectively bilingual, I think we’re fine with that.
But then as we got to talking, I realize that our predisposition to NOT speaking Mandarin could be more detrimental than we thought. What if our kids turn out to be linguistically inclined? I wouldn’t want them to be deprived of that chance just because daddy and mommy thought it wasn’t cool. Because how cool would it be if they did manage to sell muffins to 1.3 billion Chinese people? VERY COOL.
Long story short, we’re officially starting our Speak Mandarin campaign. We’ll start off with meal times. It will be strictly Mandarin whenever we sit down to eat, so that’s our secret code out the window. We’re concurrently learning all the French words for food as a back up plan. I already know fromage, which is a good start, I suppose. We’ll also start to introduce some Mandarin books into our daily reading material.
It’s been a paradigm shift for us, really. I used to think that I’d much rather our kids be very good at English rather than just ok at both languages but it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. Maybe they can be great at both if we give them a chance to be. I know it’s not likely, but hey, one can always hope.
What about you? Any good tips on how to get your kids to speak Mandarin?
