Reply to Yu Yang--is the student body predominately African American, does Yu Yang have a non-Chinese track..

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Reply to "Yu Yang--is the student body predominately African American, does Yu Yang have a non-Chinese track.."

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[quote=Anonymous]None of the parents involved in my kid's Cantonese play group (with members from all four quadrants) seems interested in putting their kid(s) name in the lottery, although all sound serious about having them learn Mandarin eventually.  We disagree that including more dialect speakers wouldn't "do much to boost" the Mandarin learning at Yu Ying, as the non-Chinese dad who's fluent in Chinese (good for him) asserts.  In China, no matter which dialect a kid speaks at home, or where they hail from, full-time Mandarin instruction starts in kindergarten.  15 or 20 years ago, most provinces supported "transition" kindergartens in which instruction was half in a "primary" dialect and half in Mandarin,  but these were phased out.  Studies show that native speakers of a dialect other than Mandarin can learn the lingua franca in roughly one-third the time that most non-Chinese can, although they will speak it with a "regional accent" unless they start very young.  The dialects are not different languages - it's mainly just pronunciation that's different from Mandarin's.  Also, Yu Ying's current set-up tends to non plus us for subtle reasons unlikely to occur to non-Chinese parents.  For example, go to an information night and hear from a non-Chinese administrator how the school teaches its families how to celebrate Chinese holidays, the assumption being that those those in the audience wouldn't know how.  You think to yourself, what if these parents were being told that they'd be taught how to celebrate Thanksgiving, the 4th of July and Christmas?  Of course the DC Chinese parents who were supposedly the beneficiaries of "extensive outreach" when Yu Ying was being launched want their kids to learn English well, but they also want them to learn Mandarin, preferably with other bilingual kids.   If you're raising your kid bilingual, you tend to resent a brutal lottery in which a non-Chinese speaking child has the same shot as yours.  So you probably stay away and make your their own plans to ensure that the Mandarin learning gets done.  Many bilingual ABCs who avoid the Yu Ying lottery squire their kids to Mandarin classes in Rockville or Silver Spring, where they feel comfortable in settings with lots of other Chinese.  We also support camps for our bilingual kids, mainly in NY and  NJ.  For a lot of us, Yu Ying is on a different planet.  [/quote]

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