Little Renzo is working hard to improve his Chinese

About 2 years ago, I wrote a post on Renzo's Mandarin and although we were pretty impressed with his ability to sing Chinese songs or even recite "三字经" at young age, we have to admit that his Chinese didn't improve much for the past 2 years, with our all English speaking environment at home. 

In fact Renzo has quite a big problem dealing with people who speaks Chinese. You know it's pretty common in Singapore to have strangers who try to strike conversation with him in Chinese, he usually gets pretty angry and responds in a very rude manner. He loves to talk to people who speaks English, and somehow he has this concept that all Malays, Indians and Caucasians can definitely speak English, thus he has a strong preference to communicate and interact with them.

Knowing that he definitely needs to brush up his Chinese language in our bilingual society, we put him into Chinese class (form teacher teaches Chinese) at his childcare for the past 2 years. And this year when we were given a chance to choose between English and Chinese class, we picked English class instead as he's not been adapting well in school, and we suspected language barrier might be the major roadblock.

Now he's doing better under the English form teacher, and his Chinese teacher this year is one of the best teachers in the school. So somehow we noticed that he starts to get more and more confident in speaking Chinese at home. Although he's still speaking with a strong ang moh (Caucasian) accent, his Chinese articulation is very accurate, just like his English. His teacher once mentioned that he was helping to teach other kids how to pronounce "红毛丹" (rambutan) in school! The only problem is that he's using a lot of "direct translation" from English to Chinese which makes his sentences less fluent, and more hilarious. For example, "I want to throw this into the dustbin"，becomes 我要丢这个去里面在垃圾桶 instead of 我要把这个丢进垃圾桶里面 in Renzo's language.

Last night, he happily told us, "我是一个火车，爸爸是树，妈妈是一个球，Rynus是一个小松鼠". He always self proclaim he is the longest wheel train simply because he loves trains so much! We asked him why daddy is a tree, he answered it's because daddy is growing taller and taller, yes in his eyes, and in his little heart, daddy is a tall and strong man! And when we asked him why he thinks Rynus is a squirrel, he said: "因为，我不知道他是什么shape的!".. Well not much logic here but at least that's a good try!

Of course I got pretty upset and "complained" to daddy that I must be too fat to be described as a BALL. Renzo immediately "corrected" me, "不是的妈妈，妈妈是一个球，不过，不是一个胖胖的球!".. Awww how sweet!!!!! My son knows what I was complaining about. But then he followed by, "是一个球，就像一个大西瓜!".. Gosh, is watermelon any "slimmer" than a ball then?!!

Anyway we have to really thank Renzo's school and teacher for their incredible hard work. It's still tougher to teach Renzo Chinese than English, but we can definitely conquer, together!!

This is what he learned in school, and all credits must go to his Chinese teacher, 戴老师!!