Hi. Sorry it’s been a while – I now have a 4.5 year old and a 2 year old. We are still doing the bilingual thing and reading lots of Chinese books. In the last 6 months or so, the experience of reading these books has changed for me. As the complexity of the books we are reading increases, I am running into more and more characters I don’t know and having to spend more and more time looking them up before I can read them to Ro (4.5). Our books are full of post-it notes with pinyin and occasionally definitions as well. It is…not aesthetic. Honestly, I thought my Chinese was better than this.
So I’m actually here to tell you about a new project we’ve started – a Chinese reading companion app. I want something to replace those post-it notes so I don’t need to spend ages sitting with my dictionary before I read a book for the first time with my son, so I’m not interrupting our reading time handwriting characters into Pleco, and definitely so new books don’t sit on a shelf for ages not being read because I haven’t had a chance to learn them yet.
I am very excited about it, not least because my husband is working on it with me and he actually has the time and skills to code an app so it’s not relying on just me and what time I can scrape up. Also, we haven’t worked on a project together since we put down the podcast, other than the kids I mean.
In other general bilingual kiddo updates, Ro has “learned” about 170 characters on the iHuman Chinese app. We still use it, but since he is 80% the initiator on this, it’s not daily or even weekly. That’s perfectly fine by me. We also have a couple of reading curriculums in books that I push him to read with me once in a while – a couple of our friends brought us the first two boxes of the 小羊上山 graded readers, and we are almost through the first book of the 四五快读 curriculum. Ro is also watching a couple episodes of the Journey to the West cartoon every weekend, sometimes with Em.
Em (2) speaks more Chinese than I could have hoped, honestly. She seems equally proficient in both, speaking short sentences and having seemingly equal comprehension. She loves Caroline Jayne Church’s books (we have them in traditional Chinese) 我好爱好爱你 / I Love You Through and Through and 十只脚趾头 / Ten Tiny Toes and requests them often at bedtime, though she does think the kid’s name is 爱你. Aside from those, her favorites include Over the River and Through the Woods, 不好，鼓起来, and 小小的，大大的 from the 小羊上山 curriculum. With the last two, Ro can read them to her (one memorized, one actually reading) and I can see a sense of pride in his abilities to read and it is absolutely the sweetest, cutest thing ever.
Etymology Adventures 