Pocket language guide

Last week I ordered the "red card" language guide from OCDF. It arrived in the mail yesterday and is even better than I had hoped! Who knew that so much could fit in such a small space?!

I had been sort of casually working on my own pocket phrase guide, but I think I'm going to abandon that effort in favor of this handy little card (it's a 22 page fold-out). I'll also probably bring the travel language guide that we ordered from our agency, since it isn't very big either.

It's fun to actually be thinking about travel!

Mandarin Chinese Committee

Today I went to my first meeting with the Mandarin Chinese Committee. It turns out that they did get the grant money, but weren't able to find a teacher in time for Fall semester. They would still like to start in January - either as a before/after school program or as part of the regular curriculum. We are all tasked with looking for potential instructors and will reconvene next month.

If we aren't able to find a Mandarin instructor, they will probably pursue some other language or culture program. The grant money won't apply, but the district, it seems, is committed to "global literacy". I left feeling pretty good about Nora's future school.

Has anyone read Languages and Children: Making the Match: Foregin Language Instruction for an Early Start Grades K-8 by Helena Curtain and Carol Ann Dahlberg? What about anything by Stephen Krashen? I think I need to do some background reading and these all came up in this afternoon's meeting.

Ni hao! Yo! ¡Hola!

So I'm a little bit behind in newspaper reading - I'm reading yesterday's Star Tribune - and noticed a great article about diversity in children's television programming. This was also mentioned in yesterday's transracial parenting workshop, but of course I forgot about it until I saw it again in the paper this morning.

It talks about how much more common diversity is in children's programs than it is in adult prime time television. "Sesame Street" included people of color from the beginning. I remember that from my own childhood. "Zoom" too - remember "Zoom"? Morgan Freeman was the Easy Reader. Yet prime time tv only has four shows that feature people of color in lead roles.

The other great thing about the new kid's shows like "Dora the Explorer", "Go Diego, Go!" and "Ni Hao, Kai-lan" is that they make multi-lingualism cool. How great is that?!

You can read the whole article here (click on the word here). You can also learn more about "Ni Hao, Kai-lan" on Nick Jr's website at http://www.nickjr.com/shows/ni-hao-kai-lan/index.jhtml

Still hoping to be the change

Last Spring I was very interested in getting a Mandarin language program in our local grade schools. I wrote about it here and here. For a while things were looking promising - I'd volunteered to be on the task force and everything. Then... nothing happened.

I'm not really sure where this stands anymore. Maybe our district didn't get the grant for the investigation or maybe it got put on hold over the Summer and not picked up right away in the Fall. Or maybe something happened and they forgot to include me.

Last week, the district learning services director contacted me again, though, and said that she wanted to schedule a meeting. Today I received another message saying that the meeting will be next Wednesday. I'm going to clear my calendar at work so I can leave a little early and make it back home (i.e. our town) for a 4:00 meeting. We are apparently going to "discuss progress thus far and ideas for future implementation". That sounds pretty good to me. I'm excited again. I'll let you know how it goes!

Be the change

Do you remember my lamenting the lack of Mandarin Chinese in our school district? Well I did email the district learning services director asking about foreign language programming at the elementary level. She responded and said that currently our district offers Spanish and German for grade 7 and above, but that their Long Range and Strategic Planning committee was looking into the need for language and cultural awareness at a much earlier age. She said that she would mention my interest at their next meeting and suggested that I share my thoughts with some of the school board members.

That message came last week on the day that we left for the North Shore, so I hadn't responded to it yet, although I've been thinking about it a lot. First I had a big reaction to German being one of the two selected languages, but then decided that it was probably a regional thing. Refocusing on my main objective of getting foreign language in the elementary schools, the next thing to do seemed to be get a list of the school board members and start calling them.

Then today I got a phone call, a voice mail message really, from the learning services director. She said that she has applied for a state grant to investigate offering Mandarin Chinese in the elementary schools and was wondering if I would like to be on the exploratory committee with her. Hmm, let me think about that.... YES!!!!

Mad, mad, mad - I'm mad.

Great news - Chinese immersion schools have come to our area!! Bad news - we live across a state line from these programs, so Nora won't be eligible to attend. Not even if we pay tuition. I know. I asked. This STINKS.

I've also learned from a friend that our local school district does not offer any foreign language programming at the elementary level. This REALLY STINKS, not just for Nora, but for all the kids in our community.

Those of you who know us know that moving to the other state is not an option. Long story. Project house.

So I figure that there are two options. Right now I'm pursuing both:

(1) Convince the immersion school in the neighboring state - where we both work, by the way - to let our kids attend if we pay tuition. For the record, Chuck in my van pool suggested that I get a P.O. box in the other state and "fudge" our way in and I deemed this unethical. One karma point for me.

(2) Devote my time and energy to bringing language programming to our up-and-coming school district. I just sent an email to my unwitting victim the district learning services director, offering my assistance in the matter.

Thankfully, I have a little time. I figure that Nora will be able to attend Chinese daycare for 4-5 years until I can impose my will on the world figure things out.

For anyone facing the same problem, here are a couple of resources:

NACELL

Nanduti

and, of course, there's always my favorite book.

Too much time on my hands...

I really don't have too much time on my hands, but I am feeling anxious, like I should be doing more to prepare for Nora. Even though her arrival is still many months out, it feels so much closer now.

I bought a book (at Borders, of course) over the weekend. It's called Raise a Smarter Child by Kindergarten and was written by a neurologist. It is fascinating.

We also received a phone call from our agency on Monday and a "Waiting Families Support Packet" from them tonight. The support packet is wonderful - it talks about the logistics of match day, travel arrangements, attachment... 20+ pages of really useful information, all new to us. I've already read it twice and will probably print off a hard copy to read tomorrow.

Oh, and we're resuming Mandarin lessons. This time we're taking a community ed class with my friend and co-worker "J" and her DH. Nicole will be our teacher again, which is great. Our previous dropout had everything to do with our lack of discipline and nothing at all to do with Nicole. We're excited, we're hopeful and I've had enough caffeine to make me feel like I can accomplish anything.

The New Year's resolution about Diet Coke. Let's pretend I never said anything about that.

Success and failure

Today is both a good day and a bad day.

BAD -- Rob and I have decided to discontinue our Mandarin lessons, at least for a while. Neither of us has been committing enough time to study between lessons and aren't progressing as we should. It made for classes that were stressful and unproductive. We hope to try again someday, but this is not the right time for us.

GOOD -- Even though we weren't feeling super-motivated this morning we did both go to the gym and exercise. Rob is actually very good about going and exercise is a habit for him. That's not so much the case for me, but I'm working on it (going to need to keep up with the little one!). I've found that music does a LOT to motivate me. My current playlist is:

• Crazy - Gnarls Barkley - 2:58 (I use this for warm up b/c I like it, but it will probably come off the list since it's really not a great exercise song)
• Get the Party Started - Pink - 3:11
• Crazy in Love - Beyonce - 3:55
• Yeah! - Usher - 4:10
• In da Club - 50 Cent - 3:13
• Pump It - Black Eyed Peas - 3:35
• Lose Yourself - Eminem - 5:20 (Possibly the best motivational, hill-climb song EVER!)
• Hot in Herre - Nelly - 3:48
• Rock Your Body - Justin Timberlake - 4:27 (cool down)
• Sexy Love - Ne-Yo - 3:40 (cool WAY down)

Two others on this playlist are Work It by Missy Elliott and Dirty by Christina Aguilera, but I usually skip both of them. I haven't decided yet if they are bad choices or if I just don't have them in the right place in the list.

If you have a playlist that you love (or individual songs that work really well), please share!

Mandarin DVDs!

It was another great mail day at our house! Nora continues to get more (and better) mail than we do! Today she received the Mandarin/English Bear in the Big Blue House DVDs I ordered from yesasia.

I heard about these from Denise in the December 2005 DTC group. We were talking about the lovely name Luna which led to Bear and his friend the Sun (Luna). Denise mentioned these terrific multilingual DVDs. I'm not a big fan of tv for kids, but this is a show I like and it's available in a version that will help Nora learn Mandarin. How great is that?!

As you can see from the photo above, I also ordered a CD of children's music. I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm really curious to hear what kind of Chinese children's music has a little Dutch girl on the package. Hmm.

New Chinese Language Resource

This morning, I logged on to check email and instead of clicking past the Yahoo! homepage, I read the headlines and this one caught my eye. Apparently, China has launched a website with free Chinese lessons. The URL is www.linese.com. It looks like there might be a new lesson every day. Unfortunately the site seems to have some technical issues - I got a couple of errors trying to register and it is very slow to load, especially the audio which after 15 minutes I'm still waiting for. Still, I think this is a great idea and a really good way to promote the learning of Chinese. I'm so anxious to try it out!

News Flash - Mandarin is difficult to learn!

I feel validated! This week's issue of TimeAsia features several articles about learning Mandarin, which they say is one of the five most difficult languages to learn (the other four are Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean). It is a very interesting issue and is available online at: TimeAsia June 26, 2006. The thing that sticks in my head most is that it takes 2,200 class hours for the average English speaker to reach proficiency in Mandarin. So, at one class hour per week, we will be proficient in 2048!

One of the other articles was about study aids. I think I mentioned before that we are using Cheng & Tsui Integrated Chinese, which is pretty good - there's a link under "Favorite Shopping Links" to the right - but what we really wanted were flash cards and nothing we found seemed quite right. So, I decided to make flash cards for all the vocabulary words from the first three chapters (everything we've covered so far). I'm happy with the way they turned out and I think I might have learned a couple of characters in the process of making them!

Think we'll ever learn Chinese?

Now that we have Nicole to ourselves for an hour each week, Rob and I have decided to turn over a new leaf with respect to our learning of Mandarin. We are studying. Really studying, not randomly listening to cds in the car, hoping to gain something by osmosis. We have books, we have workbooks, we have cds and are actually doing lessons and testing our progress with the exercises. The kitchen table is our classroom, an iPod our lecturer.

Turns out I am good at pronunciation and terrible at tones. Rob is great at tones and terrible at pronunciation. Figures. No one will understand either one of us! Nicole insists that we will get better. I wonder.

By the way, I've decided to start leaving comments on. So if you'd like to comment on any posts from this point forward you can do so by clicking on the link at the bottom of the post. We hope to hear from you!

Gifts from China

Rob just returned from a business trip to Shanghai. I sent a whole shopping list and he came back with, well, some of it. To his credit, though, he did get the important stuff - a Chinese zodiac papercut for Nora's lifebook and some children's cds. Our Chinese isn't good enough to make any sense of the cds, but we did ask Nicole, our Chinese instructor, about them. She said that one is famous Chinese poems (that's the one with the man in the robe) and the other one is children's songs about Beijing. The interesting thing is that none of the children in the cartoons appear to be Asian, maybe they are visiting Beijing?

First Chinese Lesson

Tonight we attended our first Chinese lesson! We, along with another couple and their daughter, are working with a tutor, Nicole Darcy.

Tonight we worked on all the sounds and learned a song (to the tune of "Skip to my Lou"):

Ni hao. Ni hao ma?
Ni hao. Ni hao ma?
Ni hao. Ni hao ma?
Wo ye hao. Xie xie!