Bao & Bun's Bilingual Journey

After I started to share our bilingual journey on my own FB, I have Taiwanese friends reach out and ask about how we teach kids Chinese. For those who haven’t deep dived famous bilingual bloggers like Oliver or Guavarama or Chalk Academy, I realize most people really have no clue about how to do this.One thing most friends care about is whether the material we use is traditional characters and zhuyin. I myself use the above 👆 combination, but I have people around me who use a variety of combinations (like my husband types in pinyin but can only read traditional characters). I was adamant about keeping the combination I’m used to, but recently I have opened myself up a bit.

The first thing I started to care less about is our tutor’s accent. We always use Taiwanese teachers for online lessons, until recently my son has had a teacher from China. The teacher has an accent that I don’t mind much. What’s more important for me is that the teacher is engaging with my son 👦🏻 and I can see progress. But I’m not super worried about the accent because my son has an established accent (for now), so accent-wise I’m less worried. My goal is that he can read books himself.

The other thing was I bought the simplified version of Piggy and Elephant from Amazon. This set is on a lot of bloggers’ lists and no one is selling the traditional character version. We got the English version last year, and both kids enjoyed it so much. That’s why I wanted to try out the simplified version. In total honesty, I don’t quite like all the phrases they use in this version. But that’s not a problem for all the books. Some books are totally fine, and the kids still laugh and enjoy.

The Little Readers Club I shared recently is also another branch out. Most people in that group speak Cantonese, but this doesn’t matter to me because I just enjoy seeing what everyone is sharing. The best part is that I can see a page or two of the books’ interior. Some books are actually only published in HK, which I feel sad about because it’s hard for me to get them. Most children’s books have zhuyin from Taiwan, so there are not that many options for my little bun 🧒🏻 to practice reading without zhuyin before introducing a much higher level of Chinese books.