Mandarin Immersion - Background & Luka
My husband is from Taiwan and is fluent in Mandarin. I was born in Salt Lake City and Cantonese was my home language growing up, however, I am not fluent. I would consider my fluency as basic to mediocre at best, and only in conversational Cantonese.
When my husband and I were family planning, we decided to make bilingualism a priority. Since my Cantonese was the weakest language of the three (English [both], Mandarin [him], Cantonese [me]), we agreed that we’d go with Mandarin.
Honestly, we didn’t really dive in the deep end of Mandarin exposure until Kai was a little over 1 year old. We had very few Chinese books at home. Because my husband is from Taiwan, he is more accustomed to reading and writing in traditional Chinese, and we didn’t have the books to support that. The local library had books to loan, but most were in simplified Chinese.
When Kai began to be more verbal, my husband switched to speaking exclusively in Mandarin to him. There was definitely resistance at first, he wasn’t accustomed to hearing and communicating in Mandarin, so he would just get frustrated with my husband and run to me instead. We quickly realized that we’d have to stick to One Parent, One Language (OPOL) model if we wanted it to “work”.
Fast forward to spring & summer 2019, when I was busy applying to Mandarin immersion preschools and pre-kindergartens. Because Mandarin language schools are really popular in San Francisco, we were priced out by many, many, MANY of them. We also wanted an immersive school versus a bilingual school - which meant 100% language immersion instead of blocks of time or certain teachers that would speak a particular language. The process of finding a preschool/pre-k is a whole other blog post, but we finally settled with one.
And so, we enrolled Kai in a home preschool with a teacher that was a Taiwan native. Within a month or so, Kai was conversing and singing songs in Mandarin. Now he would run and communicate with my husband instead of me! Then on Thanksgiving, we took our first international trip to Taiwan and I’d have to say, seeing my son being able to communicate with his aunts, uncles, and cousins was such an extraordinary moment to witness. It was amazing to see him realize that other people speak Mandarin besides baba and laoshi.
Throughout this whole time, we slowly built our Chinese library at home. I bought a few songbooks and some picture books, but not much, and most purchases were from Amazon. However, since the global pandemic, we felt that we needed to increase his daily Mandarin exposure with more books, more videos, and finally- with Luka.
Luka is an AI reading robot.
I first learned of Luka while reading posts in some bilingual parenting groups. I thought it was pretty cool, but I didn’t think that I needed it since my husband can just read the books himself, and I was admittedly, reliant on the preschool to do the bulk of the teaching. But now that we’re sheltering in place, Kai hasn’t been at school since March 13th, 2020, and I decided that Luka would be a worthy investment for Mandarin fluency for my kids.
You can find out more about Luka by visiting JoJoLearning. This is the only authorized seller for North America.
Some quick FAQS about Luka:
- Luka “reads” books by recognizing the cover and pages with a built-in camera
- As of right now, Luka can only “read” many English and simplified Chinese books right out of the box
- Luka can operate (speak to you) in English or in Mandarin
- the Luka app is available on apple and android
How we’ve used Luka in our home:
- When Luka was set up, I quickly pulled out all the books in the house and scanned them in the Luka app to see if they’re compatible with the robot. There were now 3 categories of books: Luka compatible in English, in Mandarin, or both. My husband and I were a bit disappointed that Luka didn’t read some of our existing books, but I quickly realized that I was able to record and upload our own voices for Luka.
- I also decided to use simple dot stickers to code each book that Luca can read.
orange for Mandarin
(like Mandarin oranges… lol)
blue for English
orange + blue for both
I felt that labeling the books with color-coded stickers would help my sons quickly identify which books were compatible with Luka (my idea was for my kids to know which books to reach for if they wanted to interact with Luka, and therefore alleviate any frustration). The different colors would then help my husband and I toggle between languages. By the way, you can have Luka switch languages during a read-aloud simply by tapping his little forehead.
With the help of Luka and the ability to upload a voice recording:
Luka can now read the (traditional) Chinese books that we had at home already- these were otherwise “incompatible” with Luka initially.
He will “read” it in my husband’s voiceLuka can now read selected English books that I feel my kids would enjoy.
He will “read” these in my voice
In doing so, you can expand the library for Luka and not worry about having to only buy pre-approved books! Do I foresee myself uploading every single book into Luka’s system? No. I think I will upload my boys’ favorites and just a few others here and there when I have some time to do so. I still enjoy storytime with my boys, so I don’t feel the need to have all the books become compatible with Luka. I feel that Luka is a great way to have children spend time reading and doing an independent activity without any screentime. And perhaps when they’re interacting with him, you can have a little bit of downtime.
Cruz helping mama with labeling Luka books!
