How and why do we learn Chinese?

We have now had Chinese on the weekly schedule for the past 3 years. Our oldest daughter is very interested in languages and their structure, so it was a wish from her. The rest of the children find Chinese fun, because it involves drawing and funny sounds.

We use the material we come across, and in the beginning we found it very hard to find any child friendly material, so we mainly used what we could find on the internet. The best help to start of with, was the site: Chinese language .

Then we discovered the material from Chineasy and things got just so much more fun. It is a woman who has tried to introduce Chinese learning in an easier way. Tedtalk with ShaoLan is interesting to watch. We bought the books and the flash cards. This really opened our mind to flashcards and we now used them in most of the language training we do.

Can we now speak and write Chinese? No way near that yet. But we are humble and grateful every time we get a small step closer to the understanding of the structure of the language. We practice our pronounciation on our friend in the local Chinese shop, where she patiently listens to us doing our best to communicate. But until now, she has not been very impressed, just happy to see our interest in her language.