A great Mandarin show for your kids to watch

Many thanks to Liyao, who told me about this show.

It’s called 家有儿女, Jia you nu er (Home with Kids in English.) and it’s kind of The Brady Bunch in Chinese.

It’s about a Chinese father who lives in America and has two children, a son and a daughter. From the introduction, I think in St. Louis. He gets divorced and moves back to China. There he meets a divorced woman with a younger son. They fall in love and get married and all five of them live together.

I watched the first two episodes with my 3rd and 5th grader and they were able to get most of what was going on, to the point of laughing hysterically at certain points.

Here’s the first two episodes (as translated for me by my children:

1. The couple meet and although their kids are very opposed to the idea, especially the girl, they marry. There’s a very funny scene of a tense lunch where the mom tried to get the girl to be nice but fails.

2. The girl decides she’s going to get her dad back for remarrying, so she pays a middle school classmate to pretend to be her boyfriend – a totally unacceptable thing for a middle school student in China. The parents are horrified and confront the boy, who confesses that she paid him to go along with the pretense. Then the parents decide to go along with it to. When she says she’s going to his house they say “ke yi!” (you may) and then when she’s really annoyed they’re agreeing with her she says she’s going to spend the night and they say “ke yi!” and she loses it, appalled they’d let her do such a thing.

Finally she gives up.

Then the little boy starts saying “I love you” to a classmate and the girl’s dad comes to complain. (Interesting sociological issue here, he’s clearly from the South and has a strong accent, not sure what it all means exactly” and they say it’s all a mistake but then the little boy keeps saying “Dudu, I love you!” in English.

Anyway, a great show for kids and not so hard to find online:

First go to                                                        http://tv.sohu.com/

This is 搜狐视频的 website. It is an entertainment website.

After you open it, try to find the two characters “搜索”(it means “search”)，and then next to “搜索”, you can input “家有儿女”, then click on “搜索”.

It should come up with a list of items which contains “家有儿女” characters. Usually, on the top of the list, it would be the soap opera “家有儿女”

with 第1集(episode 1)，第2集(episode 2), etc.

It should come with 100 episodes.

He pegs it at about $25,000 Australian dollars a year. Public school immersion starts to look like a pretty amazing deal from the perspective. But we only know of one possible immersion program in Australia. Are there others?

Minding our languages

Hugh White

November 8, 2011OPINION

Illustration: John Spooner

The countries of Asia are becoming more and more central to our future – economically, politically, socially, strategically, culturally.

As Julia Gillard has said, this is the Asian century, and no country has more at stake in it than Australia. The countries of Asia are becoming more and more central to our future – economically, politically, socially, strategically, culturally. But as Asia becomes increasingly important to us, fewer Australians are learning about it. Nothing governments have tried in recent years seems to make any difference. It is time for some fresh thinking.

This is not a new problem. The number of Australians learning Asian languages and about Asian societies has been shrinking for years. The teaching of key languages such as Japanese and Indonesian is in danger of disappearing from secondary schools – the combined result of too few students and too few teachers. And with only a tiny handful of exceptions, the only students who learn Chinese at school are those of Chinese background.

The same thing is happening at universities. Asian languages are attracting fewer and fewer students, and those they do attract have not studied an Asian language at school, so their university courses start from scratch. That means the standard most can reach in a three or four-year degree program is pretty basic. In turn, that means the number of well- qualified teachers going into the secondary system is falling, which drives down the numbers who will start to learn Asian languages at school. A classic vicious circle.

Read more here.

What Works in Chinese Language Immersion Programs?

and immersion experts at work. (Eleise Jones)

by Eleise Jones
In order to create linguistically and culturally competent speakers of Chinese, we must have innovative and effective programs in the early grades. The opportunities and challenges of teaching Chinese to early language learners are most clearly evident in language immersion programs, which offer the most intensive course of study available for early language learners. There are a number of pioneering schools and an active cohort of practitioners in this field, and clearly an ongoing need to develop and share models of excellence and best practices, and to create and disseminate resources for teachers, students, and leaders.
Earlier this month, Asia Society convened a meeting of language acquisition experts, practitioners, and program administrators from immersion and early language programs in Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Massachusetts, California, Wyoming, Washington, DC, and New York. This two-day intensive was chaired by Vivien Stewart and Mimi Met in preparation for a report on “what’s working in Chinese immersion,” which will be released in 2012 and will address best practices and key strategies in early Chinese language and immersion. The final report will be based on the recommendations of this working group, and will include a broader representation of schools and programs throughout the U.S.
When starting an immersion program, school communities have many questions and considerations. Some of the important issues identified by the task force include: What does immersion teaching look like? What is the fundamental mission of your program? How will you identify a model program that best meets the needs of your students? What are the qualifications of a Chinese language teacher? What are the similarities and differences between Chinese immersion and more commonly taught language immersion programs, such as Spanish and French? All of these questions, and more, will be addressed in the report – stay tuned!

Submit a Session Proposal
The success of the National Chinese Language Conference is built upon the innovation, best practices, and shared experiences of educators and administrators in the field. Share your ideas and successes by leading a session at NCLC 2012. The Request for Proposals is now open – submit a proposal today!

Learn more and find updates at http://www.AsiaSociety.org/NCLC.

It’s a trend, and a great one. Another bilingual parent, this time Christina Xue, a Kindergarten mom at Starr King Elementary school in San Francisco, has started doing a weekly pod-cast to help non-Chinese speaking parents figure out their kids’ homework.

It’s a simple thing, just walking through the week’s homework, pronouncing the words and showing how to write them. But for those of us who don’t have the knowledge, it’s huge. (That’s what I tell my kids when they complain we’re making them learn Mandarin – ‘We can’t, so we want you to be able to!’)

Thanks so much to the bilingual parents in our programs all over the country who do so much to help the monolingual families. You guys  totally rock!

If a parent at your school is doing something similar, drop a line and we’ll post it on the blog. No need to re-invent the wheel, we can all learn from each other.