Accounts executive, mother of one, and Mandarin learner since January 2024. I started so I could help my daughter with her homework. Now she helps me with mine.
Why Mandarin
My daughter went to a Chinese school, and I did not want to be left at the gate
I went to a Tamil primary school in Seremban and grew up speaking Tamil, Malay and English. When Kavya started Year 1 at a Chinese primary school in 2024, I could not read a single line of her homework diary. The first parent-teacher day, she translated for me. She was seven. So I enrolled in a Saturday beginners' class the same month. This page is my record of how it is going — the progress, the mistakes and the dim sum — for my own motivation, and for any other parent standing at the school gate feeling the same way.
- Days in a row with some study
- 640
- Days in a row with some study
- Characters I can read
- 900+
- Characters I can read
- Words in my flashcard deck
- 1,450
- Words in my flashcard deck
- Hours of Saturday class
- 180
- Hours of Saturday class
Mornings on the Komuter
Seremban to KL takes an hour. The first twenty minutes are flashcards — new words, then the ones I got wrong yesterday.
Lunch break
Fifteen minutes of a slow-Mandarin podcast for learners, with my rice. Colleagues have stopped asking what I am muttering.
Homework with Kavya
We sit at the dining table at 8pm. She does her 华文 homework, I do mine, and she marks my tones with a red pen she bought for exactly this purpose.
Saturday class
Two hours with eleven other adults at a community centre in Rasah, followed by dim sum, where the rule is that we order in Mandarin or we do not eat.
Pinyin, the four tones and my first 300 characters. I cried over the third tone in March. Passed HSK 1 in November with 188 out of 200, and celebrated with a whole plate of char siew pau.
Passed HSK 2 in June. Started reading Kavya's school storybooks aloud to her at bedtime — slowly, and with her correcting me. First full conversation with the aunty at our economy rice stall, about her grandson's exams. It lasted four minutes and I understood about half.
Passed HSK 3 in May with 241 out of 300. I can now read Kavya's homework diary and the notices from school without help. This year's project: writing three lines a day in my diary, in characters only.
HSK 4 in May. And at the next parent-teacher day, I want to talk to Kavya's class teacher myself — while Kavya waits outside.
HSK 4 exam day
What I am working on now
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Measure words
一本书, 一张纸, 一条鱼. I still reach for 个 for everything, and Kavya still sighs.
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Listening at full speed
One episode a week of a Malaysian Chinese drama with Chinese subtitles. Then the same episode again without.
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Handwriting
Ten characters a day with a brush on Sundays, mostly for patience. My stroke order has improved; my handwriting has not.
What helped, and what did not
Helped: learning from my daughter's textbooks +
Primary school books are written for beginners, the topics are everyday life, and I can ask the best tutor in the house for free.
Helped: talking to strangers who are patient +
Hawkers, the lady at the bank counter, the uncle who sells newspapers outside the wet market. Malaysians are kind to anyone who tries.
Helped: recording myself +
Thirty seconds of reading aloud every evening, played back next to a native speaker. Painful at first, but it fixed my tones faster than anything else.
Did not help: apps on their own +
For the first six months I only used apps and could recognise a hundred words but say none of them. A real class changed that in a month.
Did not help: 30 new characters a day +
I lasted a fortnight. Eight a day, every day, is what actually stuck.
Along the way
“Amma, it is mā, not mǎ. You just said "horse".”
Say 你好
- [email protected]
- Phone
- +60 12-604 8817
- Address
- Seremban, Negeri Sembilan