Parent’s Corner: my son, the trilingual preschooler \ stacker news ~alter

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Parent’s Corner: my son, the trilingual preschooler

500 sats \ 26 comments \ @cryotosensei 10 Mar alter_native

I was intrigued by my son’s model of the digestive system. Apparently, that was his lesson focus today!

I never expected Chinese preschool education to be so advanced in Singapore. Primary school students only learn about the digestive system when they become third graders (= 9 years old).

What impressed me even further was when he could rattle off 消化系统. That’s ’digestive system’ in Chinese, if you haven’t figured it out. I didn’t even mention it to him when I went through the different organs because I assumed that was too difficult a term for him to learn. It seems that his Chinese teacher thinks differently. And thank goodness for these preschool educators for doing what they do.

I got my boy to bring this up to his mum during dinner. Because he could say 消化系统, my wife recognised the term because it sounds similar to the Japanese term, 消化器系（しょうかきけい). I’m not too embarrassed to share that my son got it during his first listening (as in, he understood the pronunciation and could replicate it himself), whereas I was hopelessly getting my wife to repeat herself a couple of times. Kids really absorb languages like sponges!

In a nutshell, my son can say: digestive system 消化系统消化器系 Maybe this will help him attract girls in the future or something haha

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54 sats \ 1 reply \ @south_korea_ln 10 Mar

Reminds me of my same-aged son who learned at daycare the concept of (and words for) global warming (지구 온난화), all while i was trying to simplify my vocabulary with him. They do really absorb like sponges. He's having fun repeating Japanese and Hindu words he learns from his friends too these days.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 11 Mar

Indeed. Immersion is the best way to learn a language!

54 sats \ 7 replies \ @stack_harder 10 Mar

how long does it take kids to read with Chinese characters? hard enough teaching my youngest basic ABC and i quite often soothe myself by thinking 'thank fuck this isn't Chinese!'

0 sats \ 6 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 11 Mar

I don’t think my son reads English very well yet haha. Especially so because I focus all my energy on Chinese with him. As for Chinese, I think he started recognising characters when he was 5. This year, I made a concerted effort to sit down beside him to read Chinese characters. Duolingo also helps

24 sats \ 5 replies \ @stack_harder 11 Mar

what was your experience with (Chinese) literacy when you were a kid? like it must take a lot longer to read even a basic story when you need to have memorised thousands of characters?

compared to just memorizing like 30 letters and then being able to sound things out etc

i bet learning so many characters is very good brain development though

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 11 Mar

I think it’s like Peter and Jane or Ladybird series. Those books use mainly sight words, which are easy for beginning readers. My son can read those Beginners’ Readers reasonably fluently under my guidance.

I think the main thing that boosted my proficiency in Chinese was music. I used to read a weekly student newspaper back then. Its last page came with the lyrics of a popular song. I would devour the lyrics to sing it during karaoke. That’s how my Chinese ability got elevated

24 sats \ 2 replies \ @stack_harder 11 Mar

this is quite fascinating from a dad and language-learner perspective.

Does it make it easier that Chinese characters are not phonetic and kind of separate from the spoke language?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @cryotosensei OP 11 Mar

Hmm I won’t say it makes it easier because young people these days keep complaining how Chinese is tough. But for me, because I was exposed to the radicals and gained familiarity wrt them, I could make an intelligent guess in regard to the pronunciation when I encountered a foreign word. Sometimes, my guess would work out haha. So it’s another way to remember how characters are read.

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @stack_harder 11 Mar

btw, im trying to zap but i think coinos is being weird again!

24 sats \ 1 reply \ @nout 10 Mar

How old is he? That's pretty cool!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 11 Mar

Turning six this year. Thanks!

24 sats \ 1 reply \ @grayruby 10 Mar

Impressive. Nice job dad.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 11 Mar

Thanks for the validation

24 sats \ 11 replies \ @SimpleStacker 10 Mar

China is gonna eat Americas lunch.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei OP 11 Mar

@Coinsreporter will disagree. India has youth on its side

0 sats \ 9 replies \ @Undisciplined 10 Mar

Not unless they get some better institutions. Outcomes follow incentives, after all.

35 sats \ 8 replies \ @SimpleStacker 10 Mar

True, but they've been pretty well incentivized to become educated and productive (in some ways financed by American money printing), while Americans have been incentivized to become lazy consumers looking for government handouts.

30 sats \ 7 replies \ @Undisciplined 10 Mar

I'm not sure they are incentivized to be productive. They're incentivized to be hard-working, but bad incentives misalign effort and productivity.

32 sats \ 6 replies \ @SimpleStacker 10 Mar

Yeah, guess we'll see. It's hard to get a good read of what's going on in China, since everyone only sees a small slice of it. My interactions with Chinese, for example, are mainly from academia but that's obviously a highly selected group of people.

30 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 10 Mar

My experience in China is very limited, but it did support the general idea that Chinese people are very entrepreneurial and generally disregard official rules. That's super bullish, but it mostly exists on a fairly low, sole proprietor level. They need more freedom and property rights protections in order to make big transformational productive changes.

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