How To Be Involved And Help Your Children Learn Mandarin

Summer is here!  Summer is such a fun season for me and the kids because there’s no school and our days are packed with new activities and experiences.  The season actually gives me more time to teach my kids a second language because they’re not as busy with school and extracurricular activities, so they have more opportunities to focus on learning Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.  I’m always looking for ways to be involved in my kids’ language learning.  Since there is no Chinese preschool near me or schools to learn Mandarin for kids, I found that using personal experiences and practicing vocabulary in real-life settings (like field trips) can really help children learn a foreign language.  It’s also a great time to have fun and bond with your child.  You can create language learning games out of these times (such as, bringing Chinese flashcards with you on trips as one of your games to learn Chinese). 

A few weeks ago, it was strawberry season in Texas and we took a trip to Pecan Creek Strawberry Farm.  It was the perfect time to practice how to say “strawberry” and “farm”, the words they learned from Jamma Jango’s Fruit Stand (ep.3) and Farm episode (ep.2).

My younger daughter, Supernova (2) is a toddler now and she’s chatting up a storm – asking lots of questions and learning new words at a rapid pace.  She has already begun to distinguish words between English and Mandarin.  When we were are the farm, I pointed at a strawberry and asked her how to say it in Chinese and then English.  She can say both the Chinese and English words back to me.  It’s amazing how quickly children can absorb multiple languages!  When Rockstar (7) was 2 years old, her Chinese-speaking ability was much stronger than her English because she wasn’t in school yet and she only heard me speak Mandarin to her at home.  But Supernova understands both Mandarin and English pretty well because now Rockstar speaks a lot of English, so Supernova hears both languages fairly equally.

The girls and I had a great time – and the strawberries were deliciously sweet!  Each child had a bucket and they plucked about 5 lbs. of strawberries all together.  I can’t wait to come back again next year.

So how do you say “strawberry” in Chinese?  Click on the image below to find out!