Reply to Yu Ying - Do/Can Non-Native Kids Actually SPEAK Chinese?

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Reply to " Yu Ying - Do/Can Non-Native Kids Actually SPEAK Chinese?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It comes up because a lot of parents wonder what the point of doing it is l, if a.) you’re risking your kid not understanding the fundamentals really well because they’re being taught in a foreign language and b.) the odds are that your child will never become fluent anyway.[/quote]

Yes, this is my basic concern. A couple years later, [b]the ephemeral language gains are mostly lost[/b], and the sum total of it might just be lost time on core subjects. I know there could be a lot of huffing about boiling it down to this but... if you're a teenager without Chinese speaking context, little language ability anyway, and a need to spend your time on your subjects or grades....could you really say it was worth it?

It's unclear enough to me to say, "Nah."[/quote]

I have no knowledge of YY, but based on my own experience of being enrolled in Spainish classes from age 4 - 17 (NOT immersion, just an hour every other day or so), I can't believe this is true. I've gone on to learn other languages, and haven't studied Spanish in two decades. Yet when I sat down recently to take a placement exam in Spanish just for kicks, I scored high intermediate -- a level it took me fifteen years of active study to reach in my more recent studies of another language! This shows that a) I'm not exactly gifted at language acquisition, haha, and 2) those formative years of exposure to Spanish have left a lasting mark.

This is not to say that Spanish is equivalent to Chinese in terms of learning difficulty; obviously, Chinese is much, much more challenging. But it should encourage people who spent time and resources exposing their young kids to another language: not everything is lost after "a few years."[/quote]

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