Hacker News Reader

Comment by mm321 | Hacker News Reader

What happened? I thought that humor was strictly verboten on this site, according to regulations! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Anyway, what is a 'Mandarin-immersion preschool', can anyone enlighten me?

View on HN

The teachers would speak mostly in Mandarin. My son came out of Spanish immersion preschool speaking pretty close to native level Spanish (despite neither my wife nor I speaking it).

Congrats! I tried to teach my kids Russian (my wife doesn't speak the language). My big daughter used to understand Russian, but didn't speak it; Later, our second daughter did have some slight delay with language acquisition, so that I stopped trying.

I am not sure that your son will keep the language, once he is out of the preschool. A second language is a very fragile posession, as far as i know...

Keeping a second language is certainly hard; I lost my parents' native language when I was a kid and still regret it.

Since my son left the preschool, he's been doing online virtual lessons with a lovely woman we found in Guatemala to keep it up, and fortunately his new school has a heavy emphasis on foreign languages. They have different Spanish classes depending on the child's ability, and they put my my son in with the kids who are native speakers at home. Our only problem is that the teacher sends communications to (presumed Spanish speaking) parents in Spanish, which my wife and I have to Google Translate!

Probably just means a preschool that uses both English and Mandarin. The next sentence is about the Small Child shouting in these two languages.

I was reading the comments wondering if dang would turn up at some point and shut this whole thing down.

I think allowing us to have a bit of fun on a single post is fair enough, but it can't keep happening or the balance will shift too far.

Perhaps a riff on French immersion schools like we have in British Columbia which are supposed to impart a higher level of education due to their much-vaunted academic standards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com