Little Miss started a chinese play group/ class yesterday at the new Florenda Chinese in Cyberport. The center, I soon discover, is run by one of the mums in our development (word kinda gets round among mums. And then Rockstar runs into her daughter and it turns out they know each other from school. Small world indeed. Especially if you live in the same catchment area…)
Well anyway, there’s Her Highness toddling in to the trial class yesterday morning:
(Belatedly I realize I should have left her Wisekids freebie balloon at home – I forgot – BIG mistake. Huge. It was still in the stroller, she reaches in and brings it into class, we soon find it is just very hard to separate her from it.)
The class is 5 kids – 4 girls and 1 boy; 2 Caucasian, 1 Indian, 2 Asian. 2 children are accompanied by helpers, the others have mums along. Guess which child appears to know the most Putonghua? Caucasian Boy (Hah! Should totally have had people guess that!) His mum I think has also been taking Chinese lessons outside, her Putonghua sounds quite good to me and she mentions he’s got other Chinese classes outside as well.
I think after the first session they will be hiding all the balls. The entire first half was constantly punctuated by joyous exclamations of “Baw! Baw!” during music and circle time and well. Darn, someone or maybe I should have asked her what Round Thing was, and then I can blog proudly that my baby already speaks Chai-nese!)
(Yes they even had a little exercise book!) Well she forgot about “Baw” for awhile when she got to the broccoli florets and glue sticks, but then she started standing on the chair. Hmm. Then some of us mums try to write the (in my case horrendous, un-intuitive) pinyin. Indian mum asks me what “green” is in Chinese, and then gets the pinyin down perfectly (she wrote “lu” ok, I might not have).
And then snacktime! It’s her favorite Gerber Puffs during snack, and so she has 3 servings. One of the helpers breaks out a water bottle, and is requested to use the school cups and plates, which they are all learning the Chinese words for.
There are no pictures of when they have parachute games because Little Miss suddenly takes a huge liking to the box of musical toys and I have my hands full between minor huffs and tantrums at not being allowed to dig into the instruments, and holding the parachute for when she does join in…
Finally she mostly settles down to Chinese Animal Names, though she’s still squirming on the cushion.
And then she makes good her escape.
I am so telling on her when Rockstar gets home.
Oh, I love all her photos here. She looks so confident and self assured and moved around with poise.among the other children and adults. So how many more baby chinese class will there be?
I’ve always hoped for twice a week to start with, even more so after I was mildly appalled to find she really had no idea what was going on and was frustrated by that since obviously she understands English quite well.. And I really, really regret being unable to help either kid with Chinese – I might have mentioned before I gave up revising chinese with Rockstar after I realized he was repeating the same mistake over and over and I had no idea how to correct it…
We’re still waiting for the second baby chinese class in the week to open up, so right now we’ve only got one class a week though…
oh, you mentioned that Caucasian Boy’s mom may have been taking chinese classes so I think you can take Chinese classes too online at your own pace and time so that you can converse with Miss Rockstar and Rockstar in Putonghua. Although you may think you are too old to learn Chinese now but I assure you that it is doable. You just have to believe in yourself and work at it using online resources.
I tried 3 times actually – I might be able to learn spoken but the problem was probably I tried to do written as well. One on one. Yes I crashed 3 times – the last was just before I got pregnant with Rockstar. Well I had little Cantonese in the past either, but after living here almost 8 years Kings’ old village friends have remarked my Cantonese certainly got better. The Florenda Chinese proprietor has just declared she will only be speaking to me in mandarin from now on, so…..
Yes, I think it is better to start off with the speaking first. When you get good at speaking and understanding spoken Putonghua, you progress to reading, then the last is writing.
Oh, I must confess, I am only primary two level in written Chinese. Primary four level in reading. But daily speaking and listening is ok for me. So you can do it!