The first month of learning Chinese

Learning a language at home by yourself is not easy. It takes a lot of experience to establish a learning routine that it tailored to your abilities and then a lot motivation to stick to your learning routine. I guess it is easier to learn with a bunch of people and meet regularly to practice and practice. I have not established such processes and I begin to see that I need them.


Xin Mao - Year of the Rabbit


My boy got a very useful schedule at school that outlines the teaching and learning activities for each week of his Chinese Language learning. The schedule identifies the text type and linguistic resources, the Chinese charqcters introduced and the way how the his progress is assessed.

Part of his journey is intercultural understanding. the children lean about China, how to respectfully address a person and how to communicate well. They also celebrate the festivals as they happen, such as Chinese New Year. They got presents, special food and money. This resulted in high motivation. What a change in comparison to the old way ot learning languages. How far our education system has come! I feel grateful to experience this journey as part of a public school in Western Australia!

My own learning journey has followed his learning. I now can say the numbers until 10, although he can count to hundred and also write the numbers. I can ask for a person's name and respond telling my name and asking how that other person is. Not a bad start, but a long way to go! At times we practice together and I am happy that I can help him with the homework when he is stuck.

Today when he was playing playstation he sung me a Chinese song, replicated the sounds and the melody beautifully. And I did not even ask him to do so, he just started sining out of his own soul while still being focused on playing his game. I felt honoured to witness that and it motivated me to learn a Chinese song. He said the song was about a jasmine flower.

First week of learning Chinese

The first week of learning Chinese has passed. I can count until five and say hello as well as thankyou in Chinese. I am proud but at the same time surprised how long it took me to get this far.

The last language I learnt - apart from a few words in languages on the way - was Indonesian. From 1986 or 1987 I had tuition at university after my law degre. I attended lectures of South-East Asian Studies. Learning a language was part of the course and still is. I had a choice between Thai, Vietnamese and Indonesian then. Indonesian was the obvious choice, as I had travelled to Sumatra and Malaysia the year before and that's where my interest for the area and further studies originated from.

We progressed fast and I remember well the only sentence in our christmas play that, being only two months into the language studies, we presented to surprise our inspiring teacher Professor Bernhard Dahm: "Apakah kaju sudah dipotong Mario? Anak kita kedinginan!". By the way, last year Prof Dahm received the  Dr. Jose Rizal Awards for Philippine-German Cultural Relations.  I ended up learning Indonesian quite easily and later even worked as a junior lawyer in Jakarta. It was a speedy journey studying Indonesian for about two years only.

Another incident is in my mind from around the same time. We used the hot weekends in Jakarta in 1989 for bush walking in the hills. One time we were in Bandung walking down the Tangkuban Perahu, the active volcano just north of the city. I met some French travellers and wanting to speak French with them I was unable to remember any words. Out came only the Indonesian words that my brain must have saved straight on top of the French vocabulary. This has changed by now, more than 20 years later. I think the brain had ample time to sort out the parking in the memory area.

This is the first time I started learning a language in isolation. It is more difficult than I thought and I am lucky to have a school aged boy, who learns that language at school, to be my saviour. He reinforces the little progress I have made and asks me to help him in return as well. Yesterday we went to the beach for sunset and we drew Chinese numbers into the sand.

However, this it looks like I need a more competent teacher and other strategies must be looked at. Still, language learning is fun!

International Mother Language Day 2011

Today is International Mother Language Day. It's the 12th time this International Day is celebrated worldwide. The Day is very special to the Bangla speakers, as it originates in the Language Movement Day, which has been commemorated in Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) since 1952. In that year a number of University of Dhaka students were killed by the Pakistani police and army in Dhaka during Bengali Language Movement protests.

The main celebrations in 2011 be held in Paris. Theme is  "The information and communication technologies for the safeguarding and promotion of languages and linguistic diversity".

The Language Challenge 101 from Bilingual Families Perth fits spot on into the theme, as people are encouraged to learn languages using information and communication technologies, such as the internet and other digital media.

Today is my first day of learning Mandarin. I had a bit of a peak in the lead-up to the commencement and assisted collating several useful links:

• Language Challenge 101 website
• Language Learning Survey 
• Language Plan Template
• Language Resources Wiki

I have started by selecting the most suitable site for my needs. I will learn Chinese with Yangyang. My boy brought the link home from school. 10 free lessons are up on the web that suit my learning style, progress fast enough. Yangyang is great, funny, to the point and easy to understand.  A list of other useful Chinese sites is up on the project Wiki.

Can't wait and have decided to make time of at least 15min a day for the learning of Mandarin, my new language!

Learning Chinese

My boy was accepted into the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) Academic Languages Program at Mount Lawley Senior High School. School commences next week and we are getting ready through purchasing uniforms and school books.

My daughter has been a participant in this program in the past two years, going into year 10 now. She had the luck of being allowed to learn two languages since year 8. Tuition in German is part of the GATE program and she chose Italian as other language within the normal school curriculum. She is doing well and received highest marks for both languages, most likely assisted by the fact that we speak German at home.

Since 2010 only one language can be selected  by students in the GATE  program and there is only a choice between Italian or Chinese. As my boy has been learning Italian in Primary School for seven years and still cannot say much more than his name, age and what he likes doing after school, he decided to learn Chinese. He is a bit weary about this journey, especially since his sister told him that many students complain about how hard it is to learn Chinese.

I have been interested in the Chinese language since a trip to Hongkong and Guangzhou in 1985. I spent two weeks with a friend in Kowloon. To overcome important language barriers with cab drivers I was taught to say in Cantonese: "Please drive me to Kenedy Road number 37, at number 31 please turn right". I have never forgotten this sentence and practice it now and then with Cantonese speakers I meet in my life. Not always successful I might say, as my pronunciation surely changed significantly in the past 25 years with the experience in Hongkong beconing more and more faint. Also my teacher was a non-native speaker.

German is my mother tongue. Plattdeutsch or Low German, a dialect was spoken in our house during my childhood. I learnt English from year 5 and French from year 7 at school, later added some Iitalian in evening school as I liked the Italian life style and spent a few holidays there. At University after my law degree I studied Indonesian and even worked as a junior lawyer for the German Indonesian Chamber of Trade and Commerce (Berkumpulan Ekonomi Indonesia-Jerman) in the late Eighties. But all these languages are using the same script and work in a similar frame of mind. If a German speaker reads aloud an Indonesian text and pronounces each word as if it was written in German, an Indonesian speaker is able to understand what was said.

My decision to join Miles in learning Mandarin came from the heart. I will purchase the same workbook and use additional sites on the internet to speed up my speaking. My friend Dr Mandy Scott from Canberra has been involved in the Association for Learning Mandarin in Australia. She visited us with her mother on the last weekend and we had a chat about how hard it is to learn the language. Apparently the time to aquire comfortable language speaking levels have been estimated and contemplated for English speakers. People agree that Mandarin is among the most difficult to learn languages.

But I suspect that in our case the advantage of already knowing and speaking more than one language will be significant. Also I understand that the grammar of Mandarin is simple. However, the focus of tuition on acquisition of written literacy seems to be the difficulty for new students. If we keep up the conversation in our practice we should be right. Also my daughter's best friend is a native Mandarin speaker and we can get special tuition from her.

We have a plan and encouraging experiences are available from across the ocean. Multilingual Living, a network of multilingual people based in Seattle. They ran the Language Challenge -101 where people were learning a new language over 101 days. They had many participants and their experiences are documented on the website. People had fun learning another language, within their own setting and at their own pace.

This is an inspiring idea. I missed the boat that time but am now determined to take the chance and give it a good shot! I promise to post updates of the journey on this blog. If anybody wants to join me?! We just copy the model from Multilingual Living and give it a go! I am in it and will give it my best shot!