Chinese Immersion school

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yu Ying DOES attract families with Chinese-speaking kids actually. Just not PP or his friends apparently.

Who are these kids? When we were at YY (not long ago) we talked to every Chinese-speaking kid in the student body, in Chinese, at one point or another; there were only 3 or 4 (one actually was not ethnic but was born in China). My family immigrated from Taiwan when I was a teenager, so I speak Mandarin and Fujian dialect. There were 2 dozen ethnic parents who spoke some Chinese (half a dozen fluent), but only a few kids you could have a real conversation with in a dialect. At our heritage language school there are a dozen DC kids who speak a dialect at home, and speak it well. These are mostly JKLM families. Chinese-speaking kids at YY are essentially an urban myth, and if that's" trashing YY" and "racist" talk, guilty as charged.

No dog in this fight, but I'm curious. Don't all the kids at YY speak Chinese? Can't you have a conversation with all of them in Mandarin? Why is it important to be able to converse with parents in dialect?

Is this like Arabic, where older non religious people would as soon speak French to people who don't speak there dialect?

Call me Heritage Dad.

YY kids are taught textbook Mandarin by strong Chinese teachers. But because only a handful speak Chinese consistently at home (maybe with a series of Chinese au pairs the family hosts), the bar isn't set high. The school doesn't have the speakers of dialects who pick up on the Mandarin quickly and well, raising standards for the others. If you teach a kid who speaks decent Fujian dialect, Cantonese, Shanghai'ese etc. for their age Mandarin, they learn it roughly twice as fast and well as kid who doesn't speak Chinese at home. They also tend to use much better tones, and have an easier time gaining literacy than non native speakers. So what you get at YY are many kids who struggle to speak, understand, and read basic Mandarin after years in the school. I talk to upper grades kids in the neighborhood who've been there since PreK who understand and speak Chinese at roughly the level my children did at age 3. Nobody much at YY minds, or wants to question Chinese standards (a loaded issue). Hope that answers your question.

Thanks, it really does. Part of my curiosity comes from the fact that my bi-lingual son also took a couple of years of Chinese as a a third language, but is now happy to be done. I think he feels that he'll never really learn it, so why bother. It seems much harder than picking up his second language (which his mom and I speak).

In a few years the Chinese fad, for non-Asian families will be over and it will be some other educational strategy or other language that is trending and parents are desperate to get their kids into. As the world turns ...

[Anonymous]

I agree. I think Yu Ying is a fabulous school, but I think the whole learn Chinese thing is a fad. Weren't kids desperate to learn Japanese before that? And then Russian? I think it is great if you learn any foreign language, but this obsession with dialects is laughably pathetic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I agree. I think Yu Ying is a fabulous school, but I think the whole learn Chinese thing is a fad. Weren't kids desperate to learn Japanese before that? And then Russian? I think it is great if you learn any foreign language, but this obsession with dialects is laughably pathetic.

Hit send too fast. So my point is that the Chinese these kids are learning is more of a "expand your mind" and "choose to learn more" if needed. It is clear they are actually learning Chinese (not like whatever it is that they so at CMI), but I think obsessing over dialects and accents is a waste of time. If you want to speak with a perfect shanghainese accent, that's great! However only your Chinese grandma will care.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I agree. I think Yu Ying is a fabulous school, but I think the whole learn Chinese thing is a fad. Weren't kids desperate to learn Japanese before that? And then Russian? I think it is great if you learn any foreign language, but this obsession with dialects is laughably pathetic.

This. I think it's a fad too. At least, people still want to learn Japanese because there's cross-culture mutual admiration and many want to vacation in Japan. But, China does not command that kind of attention (yet, or maybe never).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree. I think Yu Ying is a fabulous school, but I think the whole learn Chinese thing is a fad. Weren't kids desperate to learn Japanese before that? And then Russian? I think it is great if you learn any foreign language, but this obsession with dialects is laughably pathetic.

Hit send too fast. So my point is that the Chinese these kids are learning is more of a "expand your mind" and "choose to learn more" if needed. It is clear they are actually learning Chinese (not like whatever it is that they so at CMI), but I think obsessing over dialects and accents is a waste of time. If you want to speak with a perfect shanghainese accent, that's great! However only your Chinese grandma will care.

Exactly. It is like a native speaker from XXX country criticizing an immersion school in the US for not teaching American kids whatever dialect/accent/whatever is used in their XXX country. NO ONE CARES. Especially when your kids DO NOT ATTEND the school in question and the only connection you have to the school is that it teaches a language your immigrant ancestors spoke. Ridiculous

[Anonymous]

I'm curious whether the people who think learning Chinese is a fad are multilingual. I speak 5 languages plus a bit of a 6th, and none of my decisions to learn them were driven by what I perceived to be popular or by other people's opinions. Two were learned for work, one because it happens to be my heritage language and my older siblings speak it, and one because my fiancé speaks it.

The snarky pat of me thinks that this "fad" talk is defensiveness by monolingual people, but I have no basis for that. So fad people - how many languages do you speak?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree. I think Yu Ying is a fabulous school, but I think the whole learn Chinese thing is a fad. Weren't kids desperate to learn Japanese before that? And then Russian? I think it is great if you learn any foreign language, but this obsession with dialects is laughably pathetic.

Hit send too fast. So my point is that the Chinese these kids are learning is more of a "expand your mind" and "choose to learn more" if needed. It is clear they are actually learning Chinese (not like whatever it is that they so at CMI), but I think obsessing over dialects and accents is a waste of time. If you want to speak with a perfect shanghainese accent, that's great! However only your Chinese grandma will care.

Sorry, but you're missing the point. No native speaker of Chinese grows up speaking the Mandarin taught at YY. Even a so-called native Mandarin speaker speaks a sub-dialect quite different than textbook Mandarin at home. I don't see where the "obsessing part comes in." Mainland Chinese don't consider other urban dialects "hillbilly" Chinese as asserted on this thread; they consider them dialects that did not become the national lingua franca for political reasons.

Kids who come into an immersion school speaking the target language (at whatever age, using whatever dialect) raise the bar and promote learning on the part of the non-speakers, and they raise it significantly. DCPS gets this, explaining Spanish dominant lotteries in their Spanish immersion elementary schools. If even DCPS gets it, the point is obvious. Yes, we know that the DC Public Charter Board is adamantly opposed to lotteries or test-in options for native speakers. What I wish YY parents and admins would research and discuss is why the majority of ethnic Chinese families whose little kids speak good Chinese don't apply to attend. Not true for the Spanish immersion charters.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree. I think Yu Ying is a fabulous school, but I think the whole learn Chinese thing is a fad. Weren't kids desperate to learn Japanese before that? And then Russian? I think it is great if you learn any foreign language, but this obsession with dialects is laughably pathetic.

Hit send too fast. So my point is that the Chinese these kids are learning is more of a "expand your mind" and "choose to learn more" if needed. It is clear they are actually learning Chinese (not like whatever it is that they so at CMI), but I think obsessing over dialects and accents is a waste of time. If you want to speak with a perfect shanghainese accent, that's great! However only your Chinese grandma will care.

Sorry, but you're missing the point. No native speaker of Chinese grows up speaking the Mandarin taught at YY. Even a so-called native Mandarin speaker speaks a sub-dialect quite different than textbook Mandarin at home. I don't see where the "obsessing part comes in." Mainland Chinese don't consider other urban dialects "hillbilly" Chinese as asserted on this thread; they consider them dialects that did not become the national lingua franca for political reasons.

Kids who come into an immersion school speaking the target language (at whatever age, using whatever dialect) raise the bar and promote learning on the part of the non-speakers, and they raise it significantly. DCPS gets this, explaining Spanish dominant lotteries in their Spanish immersion elementary schools. If even DCPS gets it, the point is obvious. Yes, we know that the DC Public Charter Board is adamantly opposed to lotteries or test-in options for native speakers. What I wish YY parents and admins would research and discuss is why the majority of ethnic Chinese families whose little kids speak good Chinese don't apply to attend. Not true for the Spanish immersion charters.

YY parent here - because ethnic Chinese families arriving in this area want the "best" schools for their kids, and that means Montgomery county.

[Anonymous]

Not in every case. There are dozens of Chinese-speaking families (American born and foreign) scattered amongst DCPS elementary schools, generally in Upper NW. There are also small Chinese-speaking communities in the VA burbs. They tend to shoot for TJ.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree. I think Yu Ying is a fabulous school, but I think the whole learn Chinese thing is a fad. Weren't kids desperate to learn Japanese before that? And then Russian? I think it is great if you learn any foreign language, but this obsession with dialects is laughably pathetic.

Hit send too fast. So my point is that the Chinese these kids are learning is more of a "expand your mind" and "choose to learn more" if needed. It is clear they are actually learning Chinese (not like whatever it is that they so at CMI), but I think obsessing over dialects and accents is a waste of time. If you want to speak with a perfect shanghainese accent, that's great! However only your Chinese grandma will care.

Sorry, but you're missing the point. No native speaker of Chinese grows up speaking the Mandarin taught at YY. Even a so-called native Mandarin speaker speaks a sub-dialect quite different than textbook Mandarin at home. I don't see where the "obsessing part comes in." Mainland Chinese don't consider other urban dialects "hillbilly" Chinese as asserted on this thread; they consider them dialects that did not become the national lingua franca for political reasons.

Kids who come into an immersion school speaking the target language (at whatever age, using whatever dialect) raise the bar and promote learning on the part of the non-speakers, and they raise it significantly. DCPS gets this, explaining Spanish dominant lotteries in their Spanish immersion elementary schools. If even DCPS gets it, the point is obvious. Yes, we know that the DC Public Charter Board is adamantly opposed to lotteries or test-in options for native speakers. What I wish YY parents and admins would research and discuss is why the majority of ethnic Chinese families whose little kids speak good Chinese don't apply to attend. Not true for the Spanish immersion charters.

YY parent here - because ethnic Chinese families arriving in this area want the "best" schools for their kids, and that means Montgomery county.

For goodness sake, how many ethnic Chinese families do you really think live in Washington, DC and are not embassy kids?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm curious whether the people who think learning Chinese is a fad are multilingual. I speak 5 languages plus a bit of a 6th, and none of my decisions to learn them were driven by what I perceived to be popular or by other people's opinions. Two were learned for work, one because it happens to be my heritage language and my older siblings speak it, and one because my fiancé speaks it.

The snarky pat of me thinks that this "fad" talk is defensiveness by monolingual people, but I have no basis for that. So fad people - how many languages do you speak?

I speak five languages, my children only speak three. My husband and I send our children to an immersion charter and a heritage school (not Chinese) on the weekend. Most educated people I know think Chinese is a total fad. Sorry Heritage Dad. I'm sure grandma will be impressed with your children's accents, but no one else is going to care.

By the way, if people are looking for a fantastic Chinese speaker of whatever dialect, there are literally millions of Chinese native speakers who speak perfect English and are happy to come here for much less money than Americans would want. Most of them are educated in American or European colleges too. So really, it makes no sense if you're trying to be competitive in the marketplace.

Hope grandma is happy.

[Anonymous]

Sounds like you don't understand the difference between accent and dialect in Chinese, or the relationship between dialects (explaining why Mainland Chinese easily transition from a dialect to standard Mandarin in kindergarten, or maybe first grade).

I expect a change in policy, at least in regards to YY replacing drop-outs with native speakers (as MoCo does), after several years of DCI International Baccalaureate Diploma Chinese examination results have been released. The central IBD Office reports school scores, like states report PARCC scores. The DCPC Board members don't seem to understand (or care?) that the current commitment to one-way immersion does not support strong preparation for students on the DCI Mandarin track, particularly low SES students, enabling them to go on to earn not just the standard IB Diploma, but the more prestigious Bilingual IB Diploma. YY's leadership already gets it. Those interested in the problem will have to wait least seven or eight years for the change. End of story.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree. I think Yu Ying is a fabulous school, but I think the whole learn Chinese thing is a fad. Weren't kids desperate to learn Japanese before that? And then Russian? I think it is great if you learn any foreign language, but this obsession with dialects is laughably pathetic.

Hit send too fast. So my point is that the Chinese these kids are learning is more of a "expand your mind" and "choose to learn more" if needed. It is clear they are actually learning Chinese (not like whatever it is that they so at CMI), but I think obsessing over dialects and accents is a waste of time. If you want to speak with a perfect shanghainese accent, that's great! However only your Chinese grandma will care.

We're very happy with the Chinese at YY, but it's sort of the icing on the cake. Have you seen the school - the actual, beautiful old brick building that was built for monks and has a nature center with outdoor classrooms in the trees? Not even Sidwell looks this good. And the student body is almost entirely higher SES. The test scores are great, but they're not focused on testing because of the IB curriculum. It's like a free private school in the middle of DC.

[Anonymous]

Getting in to Yu Ying is a good way to avoid the poor and uneducated families in DC, without paying for private school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree. I think Yu Ying is a fabulous school, but I think the whole learn Chinese thing is a fad. Weren't kids desperate to learn Japanese before that? And then Russian? I think it is great if you learn any foreign language, but this obsession with dialects is laughably pathetic.

Hit send too fast. So my point is that the Chinese these kids are learning is more of a "expand your mind" and "choose to learn more" if needed. It is clear they are actually learning Chinese (not like whatever it is that they so at CMI), but I think obsessing over dialects and accents is a waste of time. If you want to speak with a perfect shanghainese accent, that's great! However only your Chinese grandma will care.

We're very happy with the Chinese at YY, but it's sort of the icing on the cake. Have you seen the school - the actual, beautiful old brick building that was built for monks and has a nature center with outdoor classrooms in the trees? Not even Sidwell looks this good. And the student body is almost entirely higher SES. The test scores are great, but they're not focused on testing because of the IB curriculum. It's like a free private school in the middle of DC.

"And the student body is almost entirely higher SES."

Should YY be proud of that as a PUBLIC charter school in DC?