Friday, May 20, 2011

Language

Small fry love going through her Chinese books. She came upon this phrase in the book and came to me:

它们不会读

"Mum, I don't know this word, the first one."

"That's 'tā', babe."

"That's not 'tā', mum."

"That's 'tā', sayang. It's a different one."

"Oh, ok."

And that's how I know the small fry is recognizing her Chinese characters and reading them, as opposed to memorizing the sounds and just repeating them.

Her usual encounters with the characters take on the different forms: 他 and 她, which are the masculine and feminine forms. So stumbling upon the neutral 它 and professing that that's not the usual is a good sign: she's really picked up her Chinese.

Good for her. At her age, I'd be lucky to understand a lick of Chinese, though I did converse fluently in my father's dialect, Hinghua (a branch of Hokkien), and English.

Well, now that we know small fry's Chinese is moving along, it's time to work on her BM. Yikes.




1 comment:

Kat said...

I think Rizal should buy her some BM tapes or cds first.

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