I was happy to have a conversation around shared values with another mom whose kid is doing language immersion, albeit Spanish Immersion. This family does not come from a Spanish-speaking background. So, is it a struggle? Yes. But what do they do that helps them? Form study habits.
This parent explained to me what they do to navigate and it sounds a lot like what we do. I used to rant about the kids learning certain "skills" about how to learn Chinese, but perhaps "habits" is also an applicable term, here.
Some of the struggle is about forming the right attitude. This can be seen as both a "skill" and a "habit." That's what this mom pointed out to me, which I thought was a great insight. How do you tackle something that is difficult? How do you break it down into its parts so that you can make progress in your understanding? These are skills of a lifetime. Setting your child on a path of lifelong learning is much heralded in all corners of education - principals and teachers talk about it, policy makers talk about it, thought-leaders of all kinds, and parents. The "key to success" - and even happiness - is about seeing your entire life as one of constant learning.
So what happened to the joy? So many parents with their various anxieties regarding "Mandarin" - for whatever reason, from the reasonable to the bizarre - have put their kids on a path without support. One of the key areas of support that has gone missing across the board - and this applies to parents of all backgrounds, English Monolingual to Educated Native Speaking Chinese or whatever in-between - is that the pressure to "acquire" Mandarin is so high and so much about "getting" something, that the joy and wonder has been all pressed out of it.
Kids all around are muttering or outright exclaiming that they "hate" learning Chinese, or they "hate" things Chinese, or they just snort and roll their eyes and say, "Not again!" Yup. Can't imagine, can you? Sure, when it's time to show up for a parade or a prize, there are plenty who will show up. But if you look closely, they only show up once or twice. Then those same kids seem to fade away, never to resurface.
Very few non-Chinese are teaching their kids what the lifelong learning habits and skills are, what they look like, how to stick with them. Pinyin, by the way, is not the answer to this, although it is one of the many components of real, hard skills that must be learned in order to cope and navigate, and then keep on learning.
One of the best resources to form these "habits" and "skills" is the Jinan University textbook series, what I refer to as the "ZW books" for short. But again, the ZW books are not the only answer. These books give you the clues to skills and habits around grammar and vocabulary acquisition and handwriting. (By the way, handwriting is so critically tied to vocabulary acquisition, that I think it is very hard for English-only people or people from languages that have an alphabet to even begin to wrap their brains around this point. So maybe, again, I'll say more on this in other posts on this.)
But back to skills and habits. In addition to those that are tied to the language itself, there are skills and habits that are basic to "school." And then there are the skills and habits that are about the culture. I once said to another parent that her kid, while being obviously more talented than his peers with regard to attention span and language acquisition, he had to figure out how to "acculturate" to the language. This family was a little too attached to the whole "my kids are smart, therefore I want them to "do Mandarin" so that they are challenged." Whoa. As if that's not a loaded statement. Geezes. What do you mean by the terms "smart," "do Mandarin" and "challenge"? All those things need to be unpacked in a serious way.
You don't "do Mandarin," you learn it. And by learning it, you have to learn about the people and the culture, because those are intrinsically tied to the language. (Think Star Trek Next Gen and "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.) No one goes into learning French and says they want nothing to do with the people or the culture. That would be unheard of. Why would you even bother to do it? People don't look at the differences in British English and American English and say, "oh, that has nothing to do with the people or the different cultures."
With any "foreign" language and culture, you have to overcome the "foreign" part. You have to start seeing this whole thing as about yourself merging with another culture and all the people who come with it. How do you do that? You have to acculturate to the language by acculturating to the people and the culture. And for that latter part, you have to start learning about the people and the culture, their history, civilization, literature, philosophies, values, habits, food, etc. All the stories.
Wanting to engage in all these stories, then, that is where your kid will find the joy, the love, the wonder. But if they already "hate it" then you haven't done the right things - skills and habits to study and keep studying, then engaging in the stories to experience the joy and wonder. If you've done these things, there is no reason to ever hear that your kid hates learning Chinese. But if you haven't, then that is what you'll get. And there is no way that your kid will hang onto anything that will last.
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