Lucy and Leo continue to chatter with Peter in English but among themselves they have switched to Chinese for much of the past year. With me, it’s a mixture of Chinese and English which experts advise parents to avoid doing, but my parents did with me so I have a hard time getting too concerned [...]
Archive for the ‘Language’ Category
Language Aquisition update
Posted in Language on June 24, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Billingualism
Posted in Kids, Language on November 9, 2009 | 2 Comments »
What does it mean to be billingual really? Before I came to Taiwan and lived this issue every day, I didn’t really think about how vague the word billingual really is. I just thought it just means that you can speak two languages right? But it’s not that simple. I mean, what does it mean [...]
The Apple
Posted in Culture, Food, Language on October 28, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I think I may have mentioned before that customer service isn’t great in Taiwan. This was driven home for me once again recently when I bought an apple. Actually, it was a bag of 3 organic apples which, although small cost, about US$1 per apple. One of these apples was rotten inside. Not wanting to [...]
Just call me Joe.
Posted in Culture, Language on October 14, 2009 | 3 Comments »
My birth certificate says my name is Sharon Hsiang Chen. My parents have used what is legally my middle name, all my life. No one in my family calls me Sharon, at least not regularly. My brother calls me “Je” which means older sister in Chinese. Anyway, I never thought much about my Chinese name [...]
Found a tutor for my Chinese class
Posted in Language on September 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Some of you may recall that last year I thought vaguely about whether a tutor might be a better option for me. I spent non zero class time day dreaming as classmates struggled with grammar points or pronunciation while I didn’t really learn the grammar as well as I should because it was better than [...]
How’s the Chinese?
Posted in Language on June 7, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I’ve completed two quarters of Chinese at Shida now and am taking the summer off. So how’s my Chinese? Better than when I started certainly. I mentioned back in May that I was taking a Chinese proficiency test. I got my results recently and I made the highest ranking possible on the test. Which means [...]
Math in Chinese
Posted in Kids, Language on June 5, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Some observations on numbers in Chinese from someone learning them (Peter) and watching Lucy learn them. It was one of those surprising but shouldn’t-have-been moments last month when we went to observe Lucy in class at school. She was building large numbers (couple thousand) with the classic Montessori 1,10,100,1000 blocks. I realized that she understood more [...]
Lucy’s Dance Recital
Posted in Culture, Kids, Language on May 16, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Last Saturday Lucy’s dance class was invited to dance at a church function celebrating Mother’s day. One of her classmates’ mothers organized it but strangely her own daughter was unavailable that day to dance. Only 3 students were able to make it since it happened on less than a week’s notice. (Lucy is the one [...]
TOP Test
Posted in Language on May 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
OK, It’s Saturday night. Kids are in bed. Peter arrives home tomorrow morning. He’s somewhere over the Pacific – hopefully getting lots of rest. Took my test this morning. Went ok. We’ll see in 20 days when the results come out. The test I took (Test of Proficiency Huayu - TOP for short) was a standardized test of Chinese [...]
News oriented post
Posted in Culture, Language, travel on May 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Busy week this week so this is going to be a news oriented post with little in the way or insights into Taiwanese living. Peter’s been in Seattle since Sunday night and Leo unfortunately came down with a bad cold. Kept him home from school Monday and Tuesday. His fever broke and so he went [...]
