Bao & Bun's Bilingual Journey

Since I started the blog, I’ve been trying to find a way to track my kids’ Chinese progress. I hope to keep up with these monthly updates.

Little Long Bao: There isn’t much new since the last post. He’s getting into the rhythm of reading Greenfield books. Sometimes, he surprises me with characters I didn’t expect him to know. A new development is that I reached out to the tutoring program and asked if they could develop more levels of Odonata readers. Without paying much attention, he’s already halfway through level 2, and the tutoring center only has a total of 3 levels, which I believe means knowing 300 characters. I looked up Chalk Academy’s review for this series, and it mentioned it goes up to 1200 characters. Hopefully, the tutoring center can develop a curriculum for higher levels.

We tried a trial lesson of a new online class teaching Taiwan first-grade Chinese. The teacher wasn’t engaging and clearly lacked experience. This highlights the difficulty in finding the right lessons.

Lastly, I’ve been planning for summer. I registered him for a Chinese karaoke class. I think we’ll continue with the tutoring class twice a week and add the karaoke class, aiming to finish all the Greenfield books.

I’m still waiting for some promising classes to open this fall. Without a class that helps us make progress, it’s definitely challenging to advance his Chinese skills.

I’ve noticed more English creeping into his Chinese speech. Our Taiwan trip will come in handy. I think it’s about time for him to immerse himself in an all-Chinese speaking environment again.