Hello everyone,
I will be travelling to Taiwan for one month with my two kids 4 and 6 year old. The main goal is for them to have mandarin immersion. Are there any preschool/kindergarten that are accepting students for one month and speaks mandarin primarily?
Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated,
Leanne
I would just enroll them in a kindergarten close to wherever you’ll be staying. Don’t tell them anything about immersion, etc. Just enroll them, tell the owner/teachers sorry about my kids’ minimal Mandarin abilities, and then let nature take its course. I went to Korea when I was 11 for about 2 months. Hung around Korean kids and I was speaking pretty good at the end of that.
Do they know any Chinese?
People like to say that “kids’ brains are like sponges” but I’ve worked in quite a few schools where the kids who come in don’t speak the target (or majority) language and they seriously struggle if they don’t get outside support. Especially white kids in Taiwan. People on here have told success stories, but as a teacher I see mostly failure for the kids if they don’t have private tutors that know what they’re doing.
In the US, immersion and bilingual programs typically have some sort of system in place to prepare students for that new experience. In Taiwan, it’s almost always sink or swim. And unlike throwing some poor Taiwanese child into an American kindergarten (where the chance of anyone in the school even knowing what language he speaks, let alone being able to speak any Chinese at all is pretty much nonexistent), Taiwanese teachers know enough English that foreign kids often grab onto the only English they hear, tune everything else out, and wait for translations of the excessively complex Chinese that’s being spoken all around. I’ve seen it happen enough times that I’ve come pretty close to screaming at parents for very directly traumatizing their kids with really stupid ideas about what creates a “bilingual child”.
TLDR, if your kids have a good mandarin foundation, go for it. If they can’t do much more than sing songs about the weather and say “knee how. Wah hen how”, it’s a terrible idea for everyone involved.