My husband’s English isn’t that good- including accent, grammar, and vocab. Sometimes the kids can’t understand him and it causes trouble. I always have to step in as translator. For parents in Taiwan whose Mandarin isn’t that good, my advice is to improve it a lot or make sure your children’s English ability is good enough that they won’t get frustrated trying to communicate with you.
[quote=“Mother Theresa”]
sjcma,
I think it’s quaint that you’re so set on teaching your child Mandarin, Cantonese, French, etc. But don’t you think it would make more sense to work on his English? After all, you live in Canada, not HK, Taiwan or China, and you admit yourself that his English skills are abysmal, you’re concerned he’ll have trouble making friends and understanding his teachers due to his almost completely non-existent English skills. Obviously, his Cantonese and Mandarin are quite good – better than mine.[/quote]
I personally don’t think it’s quaint at all. But to each his own.
I am not worried about his English skills in the long term as I have plenty of friends who knew zero English going into elementary school and are now all perfectly fluent in English. How many of them are still fluent in their childhood tongue, be it Polish, Chinese, or Vietnamese? Perhaps about 10%. I didn’t learn English until I was 9 and I do not speak English to any sibling or parents. So English in the long term is not an issue. I’m more worried about his Chinese skills in the long term.
But just for the record, I have started to speak a bit more English at home and he’s coming along quite well. As for French, the school system will teach him that. I don’t know a lot of French myself.
From our understanding of Montessori philosophy, at the ages of 2-3, the kids mostly work on sensorial and basic life skills. It’s very much child focused and if the child does not want to speak, no one is going to request that he speaks. There is “circle time” but it’s really just story time so there’s not a lot of talking either.
We did “spy” on him a few times and noticed he did not interact a lot with other children during classtime and in fact, tended to just wander around a lot. During outside time, he did play with other non-native English speaking kids but there’s not a lot of talking either, just a lot of horsing around. 
This coming September, we’ve decided to send him to a more traditional type of school where a lot of talking is encouraged. I think he’ll be fine. He just needs to be prompted a lot as he’s naturally shy. As much as we like the philosophy behind Montessori schooling, we just felt that it wasn’t the optimal learning environment for him.
It’s been a couple of months since I started this thread and he now has enough confidence in English to at least attempt to speak a bit of it to others. It’s Chinese-accented and Chinese grammar English, but I think he’s finally broken through that shell.
OK. Back to Chinese class. Hmm…where did I put that bopomofo workbook…
sjcma, I’m glad to hear the good news about your son. You are right to think that his English is not going to be a problem- it’s keeping up Chinese that will be difficult. I agree the bopomofo is better. pinyin can confuse a child because the vowels don’t follow regular English phonics rules. For example, “fang” in pinyin is a sharp tooth in English. There are a lot of other examples as well. When I was learning bopomofo, I changed each symbol into a picture. YOu can make learning fun by giving your child an example: change the ‘m’ bomofo symbol into a picture of a mao1 (cat) by drawing a little head and tail onto the symbol. I also do- this when teaching abc sounds and the kids love it-sometimes their ideas are better than mine. Finally, I think it is crucial that your son learn to read and write Chinese so that when he reaches his teen years, he will find Chinese a stimulating language. If it stays just a home language of listening and speaking, I think it will lose interest for him. I really respect you for your effort. Good luck.-v