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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yu Ying DOES attract families with Chinese-speaking kids actually.  Just not PP or his friends apparently. [/quote]
Who are these kids? When we were at YY (not long ago) we talked to every Chinese-speaking kid in the student body, in Chinese, at one point or another; there were only 3 or 4 (one actually was not ethnic but was born in China). My family immigrated from Taiwan when I was a teenager, so I speak Mandarin and Fujian dialect. There were 2 dozen ethnic parents who spoke some Chinese (half a dozen fluent), but only a few kids you could have a real conversation with in a dialect. At our heritage language school there are a dozen DC kids who speak a dialect at home, and speak it well. These are mostly JKLM families. Chinese-speaking kids at YY are essentially an urban myth, and if that's" trashing YY" and "racist" talk, guilty as charged. 
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No dog in this fight, but I'm curious.  Don't all the kids at YY speak Chinese?  Can't you have a conversation with all of them in Mandarin?   Why is it important to be able to converse with parents in dialect?

Is this like Arabic, where older non religious people would as soon speak French to people who don't speak there dialect?[/quote]

Call me Heritage Dad.

YY kids are taught textbook Mandarin by strong Chinese teachers. But because only a handful speak Chinese consistently at home (maybe with a series of Chinese au pairs the family hosts), the bar isn't set high. The school doesn't have the speakers of dialects who pick up on the Mandarin quickly and well, raising standards for the others.  If you teach a kid who speaks decent Fujian dialect, Cantonese, Shanghai'ese etc. for their age Mandarin, they learn it roughly twice as fast and well as kid who doesn't speak Chinese at home. They also tend to use much better tones, and have an easier time gaining literacy than non native speakers. So what you get at YY are many kids who struggle to speak, understand, and read basic Mandarin after years in the school. I talk to upper grades kids in the neighborhood who've been there since PreK who understand and speak Chinese at roughly the level my children did at age 3. Nobody much at YY minds, or wants to question Chinese standards (a loaded issue). Hope that answers your question.

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Thanks, it really does.   Part of my curiosity comes from the fact that my bi-lingual son also took a couple of years of Chinese as a a third language, but is now happy to be done. I think he feels that he'll never really learn it, so why bother.  It seems much harder than picking up his second language (which his mom and I speak).[/quote]

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