Quote:
Originally Posted by LikeAWillow
Wow, this is absolutely incredible. Does someone in your family speak Chinese? I'm assuming they do, but if not, how does the communication process work and develop? Have you been able to pick up any Chinese from the students? Ahh, I wish I had the heart to open up my home like that, but I'm too afraid that once the novelty wore off, I wouldn't be as willing to deal with all the work of hosting someone from such a different culture. Moment of honesty on a Monday morning.
For a slightly related JTIS-- I get back to that wonderful land of Pittsburghese in two days. Rumor is it's going to be in the high fifties, and I'm tracking down some ice cream and ordering it with jimmies just because I can. Cancun has nothing on the excitement of SpringBreakSteelCity.
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Actually, no, none of us can speak any form of Chinese. I can do a few words here and there that I've picked up from the boys, but on the whole, they are here to work on their English, so they prefer to speak English. Which is good, because I cannot make some of the sounds necessary to speak Chinese properly for the life of me.
Zheng, the first boy, had only those few words but picked it up really fast once he got here, with the help of a little translator machine. After three years, he can swear like a sailor with the best of us, though his accent is still very heavy and other people have trouble understanding him sometimes. Our second kid, Xiao Jin, had more English - enough to get across what he wanted or needed, etc, but he wasn't very talkative in general, so he didn't want to work on actual conversation much.
Our current kid, ZeZheng, is pretty much fluent in English, and was that way when he got here. He's also got a heavy accent, but it's not as heavy as Zheng's is. ZeZheng & Zheng are from the same area of China, so they speak to each other in their language quite a lot, but Xiao Jin was from another area of China, where the language is different, so he & Zheng had to get by with talking in a mixture of some Chinese words they had in common and English.