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]We mainly speak Chinese at home and require our children (in the upper ES grades at a JKLM) to answer Chinese with Chinese. We tried YY some years back, but only lasted a year. But we've continued to rub shoulders with two dozen YY families, and former families, from our neighborhood, church, civic activities etc. I often speak Mandarin to these kids.

Yes, the "non-native YY kids" (around 99% of them) actually speak Chinese. Do they speak it well? No, not unless there's been at least one native-speaking adult in the home who won't accept English in response to spoken Chinese for years. There are a few YY families who've hosted Mandarin-speaking au pairs for many years, and a few at DCI. Many YY parents hire Mandarin-speaking tutors to speak to kids, for an hour or two a week.  The longtime "au pair YY kids" are head and shoulders above others in speaking ability.

Why don't the YY kids speak Chinese decently?  Simple - because they don't hear enough Chinese to speak good Chinese, and because parents aren't incentivized to knock themselves out to ensure that the kids hear as much as possible. In our home, Chinese TV is on more than English TV, Chinese-speaking friends and relatives drop by, we travel to China annually to visit family, we visit elderly immigrants in Chinatown as volunteers, we take the kids to a heritage language program in MD each weekend, we seldom allow the kids to watch kids entertainment in English etc. This isn't the story in the homes of the YY kids--the parents have other priorities than pushing spoken Chinese, or can't host au pairs--so the kids don't speak Chinese well.  That's the way YY has operated from the get go, it's not changing.
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