Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

From: The Pioneer Press June 2024

Brouke Brookins couldn’t understand a word his teacher was saying on his first day of kindergarten at Jie Ming Mandarin Immersion Academy.

“We were sitting on the carpet in a circle, all of us, and the teacher walked over and just started speaking another language,” he said. “I remember looking left and right, and I was like, ‘I don’t know what she’s saying. I don’t know if she’s greeting us or what.’”

The same thing happened the next day, and the day after that.

It took several months before Brookins, a member of the first class to complete St. Paul Public Schools’ full K-12 Mandarin-immersion program, finally began to comprehend some words in Mandarin — at school and in his dreams.

“I started dreaming in Chinese, and that’s when I realized, ‘Oh, I know this,’ and the next day at school, all of us were, like, understanding the teacher,” he said. “It started like that. First, we understood what she was saying, but we could not quite speak it yet, and then we transitioned from just understanding what she was saying to us to actually being able to speak it and communicate with each other outside of just talking to the teacher in the class setting.”

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