Learning to speak and listen:
The best way to learn a language is to learn it from birth. Since we are confident our children will pick up English easily in our English majority community, we focus our efforts on creating a Chinese environment at home to the best of our abilities.
English is my strongest language, but I am fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin. My husband is conversational in both, but after a long day of work prefers English. We speak primarily Cantonese to our children until they are about 3, after which I speak Cantonese with them while my husband speaks English with them. English is the community language, so they pick it up pretty quickly once they get started. I get to stay home with the kids, and spend much of my day telling them to “講中文!” I expect them to respond to me in Chinese, and to speak amongst themselves in Chinese. I hold the line, even when they complain about it. We have had many discussions about how it is important for them to keep using the language even if they feel like they already know it, because otherwise they will lose it.
Ideally, I would like my children to be fluent in Cantonese and English, and conversational in Mandarin. I attempt to institute a “Mandarin day” with them weekly, but we have not been consistent. It has also been helpful that my extended family lives close by, so my children see being multilingual as normal.
Learning to read and write:
So far I have only been on this journey with my oldest son (entering 4th grade in the 2025/2026 school year). I will be starting my second daughter early 2026, and might update this post down the road.
I started my oldest with Sagebooks Basic Chinese 500 (link) when he was about 4. It is an excellent series and very effective at teaching the first 500 characters, assuming the child is comfortable speaking Chinese.
After that we followed up with a Mainland series 四五快读. I purchased the Simplified version, but found a Traditional translation floating around the internet that we use instead. This provided us with structure as we expanded our list of characters.
After that I floundered for a while, until we landed on what we do now. Every day my eldest reads me two pages from our Chinese Aesop’s (roughly 300-400 characters). I help him with the characters he doesn’t knows, and write down one or two on a flashcard. We review our flashcards daily, and if he knows them well, they get moved to a weekly stack, which then gets moved to a monthly stack, which is eventually retired. If he doesn’t know characters from his weekly stack, those characters drop back down to our daily stack. If the pile gets too large, he gets discouraged, so I stop adding new characters for a while. I had hoped that my son would be reading fluently by fourth grade, but that seems unlikely to happen. But I do see slow and steady progress, so we will continue plodding along.
Since we are primarily Cantonese speakers, I have not taught my son any Mandarin phonics. It is possible that some phonics might help speed up the process.
My initial goals for my children were to listen, speak, and read Chinese fluently. Writing was not a priority for me, but we have been making progress by adopting Charlotte Mason’s copywork routines for Chinese. First we practiced writing different strokes, and simple characters with the correct stroke order. Then every day I would have my son copy 2-5 characters with correct stroke order. Eventually we moved up to a sentence a day, usually picked from one of the books we read for school. My son gained fluency in copying characters, and stroke order has become second nature. In the next year or two we will add Charlotte Mason style dictation. Because Chinese is the minority language, my son is a year or two behind grade level, but I continue to take joy in the progress he is slowly making.