China Talk: The Chinese, it is Coming

For the past week or so, I have been drilling Chinese into Ming Wai's pretty little skull. I speak Cantonese all day, and she answers me in English. All. Day. Long. I then repeat what she said, translating it into Cantonese, and then ask her to repeat back what I just said (which was a translation of whatever she had said in the first place).

That's starting to change, though. Slowly. S.l.o.w.l.y. She is a pleaser, and she knows speaking Chinese makes me pleased. Thus...she is trying. However, she is also very hesitant to make mistakes. Thus, she is three and a half and is just starting to answer my queries in Chinese.

On Sunday, as we drove to church, I had the radio playing. "Mommy, I want it louder!!!!!" I informed her that asking me that way was not going to get the results she desired, so she changed tactics. "Mommy, ho mh hoyih....syut gwai?" I tried really, really, really hard not to laugh. I repeated it back to her, to make sure that I understood what she was saying. Then I said no. Because she had just asked me if I could...refrigerator. (It's a word she learned last week, but hasn't ever used before. It bears no resemblance to the word she was looking for, but...you know what? It was a word from the Chinese part of the brain, and I'll take it!) I told her that she had just asked for a refrigerator. Her response? "N....oh!" I corrected her, and then turned the music louder.

Sometimes, she gets it spectacularly right, though. (Bear with me. I've been sweating over her Chinese language skills for nearly 4 years. Teaching a child a foreign language, when it is your second language, is TOUGH!)

This morning, we were sharing a grapefruit. (Which I was NOT pleased about. I didn't think the kids would like it, so I gave them a bite so they would leave me alone. THAT backfired. Now I have to share my grapefruits. *grumble mumble*) I speared out a piece for me. "Nigo haih ngohge." (This is mine.) I spooned out a piece for Siu Jeun. "Nigo haih Siu Jeun ge." (This is Siu Jeun's.) I spooned out a piece for Ming Wai. "Nigo hai Ming Wai ge." (This is Ming Wai's.)

I spooned out the next piece, and I heard a little voice next to me. "Nigo haih Siu Jeun ge!" I didn't say anything as I spooned out the next piece. "Nigo hai Ming Wai ge!!" While she was chewing her piece, she said. "Gogo haih Mommy ge!!!"

I cannot TELL you how proud of her I was. Not only did she correctly form sentences...she even changed the tense for my piece (gogo means "that" while nigo means "this.") She looked at me, grinning, knowing that she had just done a Really Good Job.

The best part? Siu Jeun is like a little parrot right now. He is copying words left and right, and even remembering some of them. (Although, I might be the only one in the world that would know that "Goo Goo Eek." is chocolate. It kind of makes sense...in Chinese, it's "jyu gu lihk." So, he's close....) When Ming Wai speaks Chinese, so does Siu Jeun. And that just warms my heart.

One more quick story, because I want to remember this. The other night, she spit out her first (to my knowledge) self-constructed Chinese sentence. And it was awesome. She climbed out of the bathtub and started drying herself off. Suddenly, she stood up and thought for a moment, then grinned and said very slowly, "Ngoh pet-pet hou hoisam!!!" I started to laugh and then congratulated her. She had just informed me that her rear end was very happy. And I suppose it was, being freshly washed and all. Heh.