Two things parents need to help their children become bilingual: patience and flash cards
My daughters were born in Hong Kong, but they have had a slow start learning Chinese. It is something that I regret deeply and I blame myself. Cantonese is not their mother tongue, and having immigrated from Canada and being of Bessarabian heritage, I couldn't do much about it.
Over the years, my girls have picked up a smattering of languages. They can sing Happy Birthday in Cantonese, they can count to 20 in French, and they know quite a bit of Tagalog. Now, at last, my daughters go to a school that offers Putonghua instruction every day.
I am excited for all of us, because I have decided that learning Putonghua is going to be a family matter. I have always felt that the supreme benefit of living abroad is that your offspring will be bilingual.
Where I grew up in Manitoba, in the plains of central Canada, I was the star pupil of my French lessons, which began in grade five. So good was I at picking up la langue francaise that I became the teacher's helper. Knowing talent when she saw it, Miss McCrimmon (my French teacher and, yes, that was her real name) was soon calling on me to help students who were having a hard time mastering the language. I remember coaching my classmates in French pronunciation.
I knew that mnemonics would be useful to help them with the recitations necessary to advance to the next page in the textbook. In this way, c'est une bonne idee (that's a good idea) became 'such a bonny day'. It worked. Classmates advanced, and I patted myself on the back for a job well done.
But when I moved to eastern Canada with my parents, I discovered that my French was not good at all. I found myself receiving remedial lessons after school. This was a valuable, character-building experience in the long run, but I didn't know that at the time.
Because of this experience in foreign language acquisition, I'm determined to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with my children as they learn a second language.
The timing of my new-found determination is auspicious. One Friday, my youngest came home with a low mark in a Putonghua dictation. She was demoralised. It was probably the first time she had had such a low result. I realised the day had come when I could start applying my language training background to my children's education. Flash cards for everyone. There was to be another dictation on Monday. E-mails of encouragement ricocheted around the family.
Over the weekend, we played the game 'concentration' on three levels: Chinese 'word', pinyin (for pronunciation) and English meaning. We played until the Putonghua pronunciation and English meaning became second nature. Then I made a second set of Chinese word cards and we played concentration by matching the identical pairs.
Every time we flipped a card we had to say it and pretend to write the character in the air with our index finger. I would flip the cards for my daughter and she would write the character in the air without looking at the card as a prompt.
On that Monday morning, our helper walked my daughter to the bus stop to give her what we named 'the last-chance-saloon' quiz. By then, my daughter was very sure of herself. She got a perfect score. I even learned a thing or two.
I know that at this level it will be easy for me to stay one page ahead of my children's textbooks, so to speak. But it is my fervent hope that both my daughters will be talking circles around me very soon.
In fact, the eldest already is. I am now dreaming of summer sojourns to Beijing for further study. But for now, I'd better hit the books and make some more flash cards.
Karmel Schreyer is a writer and mother of two children
