What should the focus be ? Strength or weakness?

Is chinese language really so hard to learn ? As a kid, I have no issues with chinese till secondary school as we speak mainly Chinese and dialect at home when I was young. I only started disliking it after I got to secondary school as there’s just a lot of memorising and rote learning and it ceased to be enjoyable. 

Now I am facing the same issue with the kids who don’t seem to get chinese though we do speak it at home. For instance, I have repeated the reading of the same book to Cayson for weeks but he simply cannot remember the chinese word for hippo , beaver and crocodile despite knowing the English equivalent. For crocodile, he would call it a shark in chinese 鲨鱼 which is on the next page. And he can’t recall it five minutes after I corrected him. As I repeated myself calmly for the 100th time , I reminded myself he’s really good in jigsaw puzzles for his age and he’s got very high empathy skills and hence, not being able to grasp these chinese words is really no big deal at this stage. 

In the other room, Cayen faced the same chinese challenge. He can’t seem to grasp the third sound of the Hanyu Pinyin .. he tends to recognise it as the second sound. This was despite repeating many times round for a few words. I’m not sure why that’s the case but again, I remind myself he’s good in so many other things like maths and piano and stuff, not knowing his chinese spelling perfectly or Hanyu Pinyin really isn’t a big deal. Perhaps he just doesn’t get it right now, and maybe he will see the light soon but in any case, he’s still so young. I don’t recall learning Hanyu Pinyin so early during my times anyway. 

I have a nagging suspicion that we perhaps may all be expecting kids to grow up too fast in general..i.e. expecting them to do things or learn things well beyond their age. Maybe some can do it in some subjects and some can do it across all. Or maybe for the majority,  it’s just not quite possible with the exception of lots of tuition or parental guidance to do it consistently across all subjects since it’s all being fast forwarded beyond their biological capabilities or attention spans. 

We can focus on their strengths or we can focus on their weakness, and I choose to focus on their strengths and what drives their love of learning for life, even if it means less than perfect marks for spelling or tests. 




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