How Quickly We Adapt

After a little over thirty days the children started to communicate in Chinese. It was a flashback to my childhood when I was learning Spanish - and my father would only speak Spanish to me until I was fluent. Being in an environment where only Chinese was spoken helped the children to pick it up rather quickly. In fact, we had several people tell us how good our children's pronunciation was....like "real" Chinese they would say.

We learned about 25 characters, only 10,000 more to go! But we learned enough symbols to find restrooms, food, and entrances/exits. Along with roughly 50 words we began to carry small conversations on with the local people we would meet. The taxi drivers were always ready to practice their English on you - and you to practice their Chinese on them.

I was impressed with Donny on our last shopping trip. He asked the clerk in Chinese, "Can I see that one? How much does it cost? And are you kidding, that is too expensive!" And when the clerk would not deal any further, he turned on the tears...the clerk gave into Donny's offer of two pairs of tennis shoes for 100 RMB ($14 USD) just to get the crying to stop and all of the other Chinese shoppers to stop ridiculing him for not dealing with the cute little "doll" boy.
When we come back home we plan on continuing our Mandarin Chinese lessons - on this trip it has become very apparent to me the business opportunities that exist for those that are fluent in Chinese and English. Each day in the China Daily newspaper there were countless advertisements for English/Chinese speaking businesspeople from major corporations like Motorola, Microsoft, and Krispy Kreme Donuts.

(The Torch Building featuring gigantic television screens.)

In the statistics that I see China is quickly become the next financial powerhouse - and I plan on making sure that the children have the opportunity to learn the language to leverage themselves in their adult lives whether they are missionaries or business people learning a second language is something that will enhance their lives.