Not a native speaker? Don’t be discouraged

My husband and I are not a Chinese native speaker but we introduced Chinese language to our children since they are babies. The following is a quote from an article from the Multilingual Children’s Association:

Not speaking perfectly and occasionally being at a loss of words turn out to really be not problems at all. Here’s why:

When baby is small, the language is very simple; as he grows, your own language will grow alongside him. You will have plenty of time to brush up and to maybe take a refresher class or two.

Native speakers make mistakes too, so don’t even worry about it. Your mistakes will be ‘overruled’ the amount of exposure your child gets to the language. The same is true for pronunciation. How many different accents exist even within one single language?

You’ll always be able to find native speakers to supplement your own efforts. You can or plan a few trips to the country for full immersion which will be good for both of your language skills.

My Chinese vocabulary has indeed grow alongside with my daughter. I took Chinese lessons when I was in primary school age and never really use the language afterwards. So I almost forgot everything. But now I start to remember what I’ve learned and learn more words as I read Chinese children books or watch Chinese programs with my daughter.

So, what if we can’t keep up with the Chinese learning? I think no effort will be wasted. As my own experience, even though I forget a lot of Chinese characters and words I learned during my childhood, but at least I know some basic Chinese language. I can still understand simple conversation in Chinese. I can read some frequently used Chinese characters. I know what are radicals, I know how to count number of strokes in the Chinese characters, so I can still look up the characters in Chinese dictionary.

Posted by: Grace
www.earlylearning-chinese.com