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- Опубліковано 4 січ 2024
- This is the first Mandarin Monkey Podcast episode of 2024. We dig into Mandarin learning goals and new year goals in general.
Spoken in both Mandarin and English the Mandarin Monkey podcast is a Chinese and English Language podcast. A mixed couple (Tom & Ula) living in Taiwan, teach Chinese through the use of Chinglish (Chinese and English) on a variety of topics. Learn Chinese, study methods, Entertainment, news, life, business, hints and tricks to learning Mandarin. Hear a native speaking naturally and at natural pace but with the English translation so you can follow the context of the conversation. Enjoy.
Happy New Year Everyone!
新年快乐！
Happy New Year! Passing on bilingualism is crazy difficult. My mother was advised not to try (many decades ago), so as not to confuse me. Regrets, but it's hard to see how she could have made it work. Our problem was different. Neither me nor my wife is first language Mandarin, but there's no way she could have taught my kid for long. We hired a baomu who doubled as a tutor but the only way to help my kid breakthrough as a 5th grader was to enroll him in a guoxiao. He's way behind, but learning far more, far faster than any other way. The (single) mom I saw that succeeded best in passing Mandarin in an English language country basically home-bushiban'ed -- speaking at home, copying Tang dynasty poems, the works. It helped that she was a teaching assistant at the school her kids attended, so she had them work on their Mandarin while she volunteered for the late pickup service.
raising bilingual kids was a very different experience for me and my wife as 2nd generation Taiwanese-Americans. We didn't start learning Mandarin until our 20s (we both spoke Taiwanese with our parents) and so our Mandarin isn't that great, but when our kids were born we (and our parents) only spoke to them in Mandarin, ZERO English to them. Not even code switching. I think we learned from how our parents speak to us that code switching was a big problem because we never learned some of the most important words in a sentence in the mother tongue. Our kids learned English at school, they were pretty much ESL learners.
Today our kids' (3rd generation Taiwanese-American) Mandarin is way better than ours. But they are an exception, we don't have any peers whose kids' Mandarin is even close to as good as our kids'. Our kids even get mad at us for speaking to them in English, which we need to do sometimes because our Mandarin isn't sufficient to explain certain things.
Truly interesting. We are not sure if there is a ‘correct’ way to raise bilingual children. We hope we are doing it the ‘right’ way or a right way. Very glad it worked out for you and your children!
@@MandarinMonkey Thank you! I'm not sure either. What we did worked with our kids, but it's possible it might not have worked with other kids. It could be a nature vs nurture thing, where our kids were just born more predisposed to the mother tongue, whereas we know kids that just want to be more Americanized.
oh, and my wife bought tons of comics in Mandarin. I think that helped a lot too.
Never heard Ula speak so much English suddenly... that felt strange lol
Ha ha. We both saw this and looked at each other just now and said ‘did I/you?’. Memory span of squirrels. 🐿️