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[quote=Anonymous]Do you speak it at home? How much do they know?  I attended (by force) Chinese heritage language school and hated it by late elementary/early secondary, though I was forced to go until 9th grade.

In part this is because I spoke it at home with both parents and still am conversationally fluent and could maintain contact with family members.  My parents were also part of a large community where most of their friends spoke Mandarin, and so I heard it reinforced then.

But they used outdated learning practices (rote memorization, written exercises) and I started French in middle school.  I was using much more authentic text in my French classes while we did “a unit a week” in Chinese.  By early middle school, the language we were tested on each week was not used in my everyday language, and I would memorize it only to forget it the next week.

And the performances were cringingly embarrassing.

Today, I know enough Mandarin to converse with family about how my day and week was and most household conversations.  I do not know enough to talk about social issues or politics in Chinese with my parents, which is a bummer, but I certainly wouldn’t have learned that in language school.  As I’ve grown older, that is my only regret— that my mom and I have never had a good convo on sex ed, for example, because of our language gap.  But I don’t regret not being able to read more characters or vocabulary, simply because all of my learning after late elementary or early secondary was not reinforced in my daily life or in hands-on activities, so I would have remembered none of it.[/quote]

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