Fun Chinese reading, thanks to Xiao Ding Dang

If you think Andre's English reading is dismal, wait till you hear about his Chinese. It's practically non-existent - limited to his school textbooks and assessment books. Once in three weeks, we go to the library and we'll borrow a whole armful of English books, plus the cursory Chinese book thrown in for good measure (and out of guilt). By the time the books are due, we'll be lucky if he even picked up the Chinese book, let alone read it.

Of course we parents are at fault too, Chinese is Kenneth's duty and he has so far only focused on getting homework and tuition work done. You probably can tell the lack of priority by the fact that this is the first and only post on Chinese since I started my blog half a year ago.

Chinese is just not my favourite topic - it's like a foreign language to me. This is despite having scored B grades at 'O' and 'AO' level Chinese, which only reinforces my belief that the Singapore system rewards those with exam skills because I say this in all honesty - that my pathetic standard of Chinese is somewhere between the p2 and p3 levels. I am a living example that the old methods of teaching Chinese HAVE FAILED. I sometimes hear people who complain about the new methods, that they place too much emphasis on hanyu pinyin or rely too much on English, yadda yadda. I think it's just the usual rejection of anything new and inclinations to hang on to tradition. To me, anything is an improvement on past methods which relied purely on rote learning, memorising and killed any love of the language. Kenneth took Chinese as a first language for 10 years, he was from a SAP school. Now, he communicates haltingly with the tuition teacher and his conversations are sprinkled with English. FAIL!

Just as I'm keen to improve Andre's standard of English through reading, I think it's important to foster his love of Chinese via reading Chinese books. The problem is Andre views this as work - reading + Chinese = double whammy. So when Adeline told me about the Xiao Ding Dang comics, I immediately grabbed at the opportunity to ask her to buy them for me.

Here they are, six volumes of Xiao Ding Dang comics for only about $4.80 each (why is it that Chinese books are generally so much cheaper than English books?) When I first showed them to Andre, he went "yay!" and then, "hah? why not in English?" At first, he only looked at the pictures, then later I made him read the Chinese and it wasn't too painful (after he'd gotten the hang of reading up and down, from right to left). The Chinese is pitched at just the right level - for lower primary so he knows most of the words (more than me *blush*). Plus the comics are in full colour and the stories are so funny. Here's one where everything from a book comes alive and Xiao Ding Dang and Da Xiong have to deal with a giant mammoth.


Of course I know that he can't just rely on reading comics forever but this is one small step towards cultivating an interest in the Chinese language. Thanks a million, Ad!