Dear Jess,
Teaching my toddler my second language, Cantonese, has been hard. My main hurdle has been remembering to speak it as much as possible. My husband doesn’t speak Cantonese, so our house is filled with English with a dusting of Chinese every now and then.
I found that doing a game or activity with the kiddo has helped spark more conversations or teaching moments in Cantonese. Carving out 20 minutes each day has started a habit which I hope will snowball into speaking more Chinese in general.
One game that I created recently is basically the shell game where you have three cups and a ball and the object of the game is to guess which cup the ball is under after shuffling them. To make it more fun for my three year old, I turned it into what he calls the “Mousey” game.
