Learning Chinese

Ni hao ma?
We've been involved with the local Chinese language school to varying degrees for about 6 years, but we've been pretty serious for the last two years now. The nice thing this spring is that they are doing an adult class. The teacher is a native Chinese speaker who is a professor at the local university. He is an excellent teacher and makes the class a lot of fun. It helps that we have been fooling around with the language for a number of years now. Having a focused class, even if it's only once a week, is starting to tie all the little fragments floating around my head into a bit of cohesiveness.

We had a set of cd's with phrases for adoptive parents that we listened to before adopting Kai. There were a handful of phrases we mastered, like "I am your father/mother", "this is your big brother", "this is for you", etc. Now those phrases are starting to make more sense to me, as we learn what the individual words and the grammar behind the statements.

It's much easier to provide encouragement and support of Kai and Shen's efforts at learning the language when we are actively learning it as well.