I teach a beginner's line dance class on Tuesday nights at our church and my class is mainly made up of ladies who don't speak English. As I speak English a whole lot more than Chinese, I have the challenge of now teaching in Cantonese (the only Chinese dialect that I can converse in). My mother tongue is actually Hokkien but I only know important basic words like eat, sleep, bathe...
My Mandarin sucks big time and the reason I enrolled my kids in Chinese school is for them to pick up the Chinese language. My grandparents' generation believed very strongly that we Chinese must be able to speak Chinese...but my parents had other ideas...they sent me to national school where I only learned English and Bahasa Malaysia. And they didn't even teach me any Hokkien but spoke to me in Cantonese!! Confusing?
I usually print and hand out step sheets for every dance I teach, but I realised that my students couldn't practice their steps at home because they couldn't read the English instructions. So I came up with a pictorial step sheet instead, using the MS Word document and a lot of cut-n-paste. Hope this works...will know how effective it is next Tuesday when the ladies come for class again...
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