How I Taught My Daughter the Chinese Language? Part 1: Background and Strategy
A highly effective teaching approach that I developed through years of training test automation mentees.
A repost of my past article on Medium
Teaching children in migrant families their parents’ native language can be quite challenging, as they often resist learning it. I faced this struggle with Courtney, my daughter. However, by applying techniques from my Test Automation training, I found an effective method to teach her Chinese.
Table of Contents:
· Started Wrong
· Correction
· The Strategy
· Courtney Passed HSK 5 with a High Score
Started Wrong
I started wrong as I did not teach my children (both born in Australia) Chinese at an early age, for two reasons:
1. My son (older) learned to speak quite late.
As new parents without relatives in Australia, my wife and I worried that speaking Chinese at home might be the main cause. Consequently, we decided to stop speaking Chinese at home. Over time, our children grew up without knowing Chinese at all.
2. Examples of my cousins.
I have several cousins living in Europe and the USA. Though they all grew up in China or Taiwan, they moved abroad during their early primary school years (i.e. their Chinese should be already quite good). They all now speak poor/average Chinese and can barely read it.
Observing this, I concluded that teaching my children (born in Australia) Chinese might be a waste of time and would cause unnecessary stress for both them and me.
We enrolled Courtney in a half-day weekend Chinese school when she was about 8 years old and kept her there for around two years. However, she didn’t enjoy it, and her Chinese skills showed little improvement. After we moved the house, discontinued.
Correction
When Courtney was preparing for high school in 2016, which required taking a mandatory foreign language course, she expressed interest in choosing German. Having studied it briefly at a basic level in primary school, she found it relatively easy for English speakers. However, I disagreed for a straightforward reason: many Germans are proficient in English, which made mastering German seem less essential.
At the time, with my software solutions (such as TestWise, SiteWise, and ClinicWise) catering to international customers, I foresaw a shift toward a new and significantly improved way of working:
“Do creative work with no constraints on time and place, for global customers.” - Zhimin Zhan
Several years later, there is a term matching what I had in mind: Digital Nomad.
With that in mind, getting my daughter to learn Chinese is a natural choice.
Chinese is the world’s most spoken language.
China is the world’s №2 economy.
The Japanese language borrowed a lot from Chinese, e.g., Kanji. Japan is the world’s №3 economy.
Both Hong Kong and Singapore are the world’s major financial centres
Taiwan leads the way in chip manufacturing, which is often referred to as the ‘oil’ for the next technological revolution.
Another reason, I can help her with learning Chinese.
The Strategy
With the ‘Digital Nomad’ concept in mind, I recognized that the level of Chinese learning in school for exams was certainly not enough and not effective. Therefore, I needed to teach her myself.
The goal is ambitious: not just understanding, but also achieving advanced reading proficiency.
Now, every week, Courtney watched one or two Chinese movies or Foreign movies in Chinese subtitles, with us.
The popular video game ‘Black Myth: Wukong’ was recently released, and my daughter now is able to understand parts of the dialogue and the story.
The strategy is to make it fun and not much effort. Every parent understands the demanding workload of a high school student, and I certainly didn’t want to add to it.
I have successfully used this strategy in my E2E test automation training to make learning Selenium WebDriver easy and fun. The key secrets are good preparation and making learning interesting. Using E2E test automation training as an example, I prepared with TestWise, practice web pages, and exercises.
How can that wisdom be applied to teaching someone Chinese? I had to find out. The details will be covered in Part 2.
Courtney Passed HSK 5 with a High Score
Long-time readers know that I provide proof/results/evidence in my articles. No exception here.
In January 2020, Courtney passed the HSK 5 (Chinese Proficiency Test, where level 6 is the highest) with an impressive score, missing only one mark each in both the listening and reading sections.
HSK 5 is the level that is enough to study at Chinese Universities.
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