anyone went to Saturday Chinese school in a Western Counry when you were a kid?

[sunnywong]

Hello

For those of you who don't "know" me, I am English and Mr Wong is, surprise surprise, Chinese flavour but grew up in Australia. Family from KK.

He speaks Hakka all the time to my boys and they are fully bilungual but cannont read or write Chinese as my dh can't either, and now that ds1 is going into year 1 we think it's about time he learned Mandarin. The local Chung Wah Association runs a Chinese School on Saturday morings fro 2.5 hours with all classes in Mandarin to develop and introduce Mandarin language to kids.

My question is; do you think this is the right time to start learning Mandarin? Do you think it may be a bit of an overload? Did you go to anything similar when you were a kid and if so did it help or hinder you?

TIA

I was born in England with parents that only spoke Hakka. They tried putting me in a chinese school once a week but kept missing lessons cos relied on older sisters to take me.

Finally took me to HK where I studied for 7 years. I hated it to begin with cos everybody treated me as a foreigner there. Couldn't understand a word of cantonese. Couldn't find my id as I used to live in a small village in the UK where I was called "chinky" and called "english" when I was in HK.

I am now so grateful for them. I have the advantage of being able to read and write chinese. (still need to learn mandarin) I know my cultural background and can appreciate the traditional values. My dc are bilingual and dd1 goes to the local chinese school. From my personally experience speaking is not too difficult, but reading and writing chinese can be very frustrating.

OH thanks MOTR, that's very reassuring to hear.

I feel I would be a fool not to at least try him in it as we are in Australia and trade and commerce links with Mainland China will be enormous when he is at the age to look for a job and I think it will give him a distinct advantage. Even if he goes intermittently or just gets the gist of it I think it will be good for him. DH is going to go to the adult classes too.

Good to hear that your kids are bilingual. Where is your local Chinese school, I guess you can't still be in that little village you grew up in? Are you settled in HK now?

I have to say, that Hakka is not the most melifluous language I have ever come across, especially when my MIL is on the blower to her mates. Loud isn't the word for it.

I'm the only person I know for whom expertise in Chinese would be useful for his job, which may change a bit, but if we look at the examples of Spanish and French, we hardly see a lot of jobs for them.
If you want to sell stuff to Chinese, (or French or Vietnamese), you are better off hiring a local.
I also wish that knowing Chinese wasn't so useful to me.
I find smart people for banks, and it's really noticeable that Chinese people have notably poorer langauge skills than any other group. Part of that is of course that Chinese is very different. But from my own experience in higher education I note that Chinese tend to form social groups and talk to each other in their native language whilst being educated far more than anyone else. We see a lot of Chinese people who've done very advanced work in English, but can only read and write it, with spoken being just awful, with people who've done 5 years of study in England often requiring 4 or 5 tries to say something in a way that can be understood.
Hint: If you can't prounounce the name of the subject you've spent 5 years at university studying, it doesn't look good.

Would I be any better ?
Just ask my former language teachers who saw no particular talent there at all. I'd do the same as the Chinese.
But by luck and through no personal merit I speak English, so it's not a problem, and more than my lack of calligraphy skills.

Unless your kids speak very good English, as in can't be distinguished from the rest of the population, the best thing you can do with their saturday mornings is either to let them rest, or hire a maths tutor, personally I'm a pushy parent academically, but my kids do nothing much on Saturday because I don't want to over tire them. No bloody way are they learning my ancestors Gaelic.

I went to Chinese school back in London and was allowed to leave once I got my grade A in Cantonese which I did!

Have to say, I don't really use the reading and writing much and barely get the opportunity to speak a word of Cantonese unless I'm ordering stuff in a Chinese restuarant. I wish I did go on to do Mandarin as this is more universal. Dh who is English and I would like to go and live in HK or China one day. I can just about get by with my Mandarin.

Our ds only gets English spoken to him, I'd feel stupid talking to him in Cantonese as I am pretty much Anglocised and have English accent when I speak Cantonese. If we were to put ds into a Chinese school, I would probably push for Mandarin rather than Cantonese.

HTH

Domini, interesting points. My kids do speak very very good English, extremely good as they were born there, I am English and speak English to them and we live in an English speaking country. And we get Nickleodeon.

We'll give him a crack at it for a term and see how he goes. I may keep him on track by switching the English audio off his Transformer dvds.

If we had stayed on in Ireland, I would have put DS (5) into the Chinese School (Mandarin) run on Sundays.

However, we moved to Singapore in October and DS is now at an international school which offers Mandarin 3 times a week.

We've only been here 3 months and he has picked up a few words - not enough to string a sentence together.

I think it's useful for him to pick up another language now and I don't think 2.5 hours on a Saturday would be too much of a strain.

I suspect your biggest challenge will be keeping their interest in the class and making them feel it's something to be enjoyed rather than something they dread going to on a Saturday.

I honestly don't know how useful Mandarin is going to be for them when they grow up as most of the Chinese in China are desperate to learn English!

I agree that languages are useful, I just don't see how you can do it to someone living in an English speaking country.
The chances of success are so low, and the goal of such little value, I wouldn't even try.

Technically, I speak French and German, ie have British qualifications in it, which will come as news to any European upon whom I inflicted my bizarre parody of their language.
When I did a bit of teenage schooling in France I saw that they were doing the same books in English that we were, whilst Brits learning foreign rarely attain the level of a 6 yo. At one point, for my benefit they ran the maths classes in English. Imagine doing that in England ? Most Brits can't even do maths in English. Recently we were shamed in the league tables by the Palestinian Authority.

Rojak points ou the basic problem. Kids can't see the point of learning a language that has such low marginal utility, and so do not bother.
Learn English, and you can communicate with half the world to some extent, learn anything else and you can go years without using the skill once.

Ah, I see what you are saying

But it should be noted that Mandarin is the most spoken language in the world and that most Chinese emigres, whatever their actual mother tongue speak Mandarin.

I think what you also have to bear in mind people's attitude in general. You may not be talking the language all the time, but when you do, you will get a different response from the receiver. You build up a rapport with them.
When you think about DC comments about maths, how much do you use that in everyday life? I really think that the child's interest is the most important thing. If they are interested, they will pick the language up quite happily. Worse case would be to lose interest in other subjects that they were good in.
BTW I will in a small town near London now.

right, well I 'll show him all my Jet Li /Fong Sai Yuk movies over xmas and see if it gets his juices going for Mandarin (although some of them are in Cantonese, never mind eh)

Mandarin is of course the most spoken first language in the world.
And ?
Chinese dialects are very rare as 2nd languages. Try using it outside places with large Chinese groups, see how far you get.

As for the utility of maths, you say you are near London. My work is pimping in the City, and will share with you that maths is in short supply. Because British kids squander their time doing legacy languages and undemanding subjects, we have to import people which is part of my business. Easily the biggest group is Chinese since like pretty much every country on the planet they get their kids to do hard subjects not to "consider the social impact of wind farms". (Apparently a GCSE "science" question).

And no, it doesn't make me happy to have French or Russian clients who worry so much about their kids "falling into the hands" of British schools that they've funded the creation of schools.

Look at job adverts, at whatever level you aspire to for your children. You won't see much demand for languages, and unless your daughter is very pretty she has zero chance of using her media studies qualifications.

Domini, I appreciate your contribution but I don't really think you get why I am posting this thread.

At the risk of sounding condescending and exclusive I was really hoping to hear from people who are either of Chinese descent or mixed race and who do not have Mandarin as a mother tongue and who have attended Chinese Saturday schools. I want to get a perspective of a rather particular ethnic and demographic group as the nuances and experiences are not ones that White Westerners like me, and I presume - again forgive me if I am speaking out of turn - you can really empathise with.

Suzy - perhaps it may help your DS's if you would learn the language with them as I think children respond better when they see their parents are interested and understand what they are learning too.

I say this from experience as a child who was privately tutored in Mandarin. My parents didn't speak Mandarin (well, not to me!) but they wanted me to have Mandarin lessons and I resented that and will admit that I picked up little of the language. I can understand far more than I can speak now.

OTOH, I have an Aussie Chinese friend who was sent to Chinese summer schools in Taiwan but picked nothing up. She is now living in Beijing, having spent the last few years studying Mandarin at a university in Sydney. She decided she wanted to go live in Beijing to learn the language as a native (and I suspect to get a better perspective on her roots). She is 40 + so it's never really too late!

In one of my sister's household they only speak in English although they are all chinese. When her dd1 went to uni, she took part in the chinese society and appreciated more of her background. But she still speaks mainly in English.
She phoned a chinese restaurant a couple of weeks ago to make a booking and they insisted that she had to have the Christmas menu because she was speaking in English. She then got her father to call them and got a different response because he spoke to them in Cantonese.

It's a very easy assumption to make. That's what make someone from a different ethnic background have mixed emotions.
I recall some years back when I was travelling on the underground, a young "white" person came up to me and started talking in fluent mandarin. I apologised and told him that I do not speak mandarin. Apparently he'd studied the language for 2 years in Beijing. At that moment I felt really ashamed of myself for not being able to speak the lingo.

Although I'm living in a country that speaks mainly English, I am still chinese. You are expected to know chinese by default by everyone. Which is one of the reasons why I think that knowing chinese has helped me to find my own identity in England. Cannot speak for someone who is half chinese though.

Thanks Rojak and MOTR

I think DH wants to learn Mandarin too so maybe a private tutor for the pair of them would be better than Chinese School, and that way ds1 can witter away to mulit-lingual MIL at home too.

MOTR, dh spent many many mealtimes in Gerrard Street being spoken at in Cantonese and just used to have to admit he didn't speak the lingo, but he used to get equally affronted that the waiter assumed he was from HK.

I think the ds-es have a pretty strong sense of identity, Eurasian kids are very commonplace over here and that's one of the main reasons why we moved (not fled).

Thanks for you imput and sharing your experiences, I think tutoring for him and his Ba Ba is the way to go.