Reply to Yu Ying - advice please

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[quote=Anonymous]Which Cantonese speakers?  They don't seem to have been on these boards for ages.

I'm a native Mandarin speaker who's lived in DC since long before Yu Ying opened. I've volunteered for this and that at the school over the years (but no longer do). I know a couple dozen YY and DCI families pretty well, including those who started in the original PreK4 group. I say with confidence that most of the families aren't very serious about the Chinese, and even if they are, not having a cohort of native-speaking kids in the school clobbers the language learning, unless a Chinese-speaking adult is in the home year after year.

The school doesn't try to expose the YY students to native Chinese-speaking young people in the Metro area (e.g. from the strongest Mandarin heritage programs in MoCo) when they could have started doing this long ago, even if they can't/don't want to recruit native speakers directly.  YY doesn't encourage the kids to hang out with native speakers their own age and it shows.  Parents love the program anyway, but from the perspective of those of us who speak only Chinese to our children, the arrangement is pretty silly. You hear the parents say, oh no problem, our kids will go live in China later to perfect their Chinese.  Maybe, but I doubt it, other than a few.  I doubt that my own kids will do this, and they have no trouble speaking Chinese all day, with the odd English word or phrase tossed in.  [/quote]

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