Many people have asked us how her English is coming along. Well, it is amazing! She experienced an explosion of language at exactly 3 months home. I am sure school is helping tremendously with her language acquisition with the exception of a few phrases I would rather her learn a little later on such as: "I can't stand this", "Just leave it alone", "Shut up", and "Oh my G*d" (which have explained to her that it is not nice to say and to say Gosh not God so she says "Goch").
She can pretty much understand EVERYTHING we say and is now verbalizing a tremendous amount. Basically, if someone new interacts with her they usually cannot tell that she has only been learning English for a few months. When we do tell them...they are AMAZED!
She knows the way home from school and last night we were driving home from a birthday party and we passed the street that led to her school. She immediately said "mom, first go right, then go left, left again, left again, and then go right" which is exactly how to get to our house. Smart girl!!!!
She also loves to write and basically copies everything in sight. She has a little writing pad and loves to look around the room to find words to copy in her notebook. She even knows some words by memory. I will scan some of her work to post here.
As for her Chinese, she refuses to speak it at home...REFUSES no matter how hard I try. She is seeing her tutor once a week right now just to speak Chinese and keep up her comprehension. She resisted at first but now feels comfortable enough to speak it with her tutor but does not enjoy it. I feel bad for forcing this on her but I also feel that it is my responsibility to try to save her native tongue. So far, she can still speak Cantonese and Mandarin fluently but we will have to increase her sessions and exposure eventually to keep it up.
I will try to capture some video of her English and post it here!
3 comments:
my Grace came home at 4. she too refused to use her chinese. i was adamant that my 3 take Mandarin which they have done for years. they are far from fluent but i am carrying on.........one day they will thank me!!!
Grace on the surface picked up english well but subtle things like tense and sequences came slowly. I would say 2 years. she is still not as strong on her verbal skills as the others but not sure if that is personality vs ability. all my girls are A students.........beautiful and smart!!
How wonderful she can already understand and speak so much!! My oldest learned all those fun terms in kindergarten too--at private Catholic school. It would have been nice to avoid them for a while but no such luck. :-)
She is such a doll. I can relate to the phrases, Allie is only turning four and says some things and then looks at us for a reaction, she then knows what look and immediately says "I'm sorry"!! She will appreciate you later for making her keep up with her Chinese. We attend Chinese school once a week now but she still wants to play more than listen. Our school system is starting a Chinese Immersion program so hopefully we will get her into the program and she will learn Chinese, also to read and write it.
Good Luck,
Cindy
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