A little about myself and my family. I’m a mother to a 16 month old baby and married to a Caucasian guy. Before my daughter was born we decided that I’m going to teach her to speak and read Chinese. My fluency and literacy of the Chinese language is almost 1% but I am counting on my parents help. Due to the pandemic, things have gone a little sideways and now the baby is stuck with just me trying to teach her the language. My husband doesn’t speak Chinese and exposure to Chinese through my parents are down to just 10-15 min video chats a day. So I’m trying to find ways to keep her busy and interact with her in Chinese all the time.
She’s picking up on both languages – Chinese and English very quickly now but I was so shocked the other day when I heard her start counting. She wasn’t just repeating it back to me after I said the next number, she was actually saying the next number before me. That’s when I realized that the activities that I’ve been doing have actually been working and she’s been listening to me when I talk to her.
Start Counting in Chinese
Chinese Vocab in Cantonese
- One (一, yut)
- Two (二, yee)
- Three (三, sam)
- Four (四, say)
- Five (五, mm)
- Six (六, lok)
- Seven (七, tcut)
- Eight (八, bat)
- Nine (九, gow)
- Ten (十, sup)
Activities to include Counting with your Child
Where to start, there are so many ways you can start counting with your child. I started counting everything from
- Counting Fingers and Toes
- Counting Eyes and Ears
- Countdown to jump into the bath
- Starting to eat
- Count up/down before eating
- Count up/down before turning off the lights
- Counting pasta – large pasta
- Counting cars – real or toys
- Counting vegetables
- If you live in a condo – count up/down when you go up or down in the elevator
- Counting balls
- Count up/down jumping into the water
- Counting cups
- Listen to Chinese counting songs on Youtube here – 123, 5 little ducks
- Count when jumping with baby
- Count stickers
Yes, basically you can count anything and everything. Don’t stop counting and don’t give up. After counting with my 16 month old for 16 months, she’s finally shown some progress. She’s even going up to 10 in Chinese. I’m just beyond impressed with her. She can count to 9 in Cantonese and she’s just 16 months old.
Happy Counting everyone!
Mommy Dragon
