Our Chinese Scholar

AK has had a Mandarin lesson each day at school for 3 weeks now, but she rarely admits that she's learned a thing.  Occasionally, she'll tell me a new word (book and ball have been reported), but usually, I get a shrug and she says, "same stuff!" when I ask what she learned (Note to Mom and Dad...yes, I realize that this is payback for all those years of my unwillingness to report about my school day.)

Anyway, because she never volunteers much information, I was a little surprised when she brought me this when she and B3 were coloring:

She said, "It's part of my name in Chinese.  It says 'an'".  Now, I was impressed, yet skeptical.  Even so, I snapped a picture and posted it on Facebook. Imagine my surprise (shock, really) when a friend who lives in Japan responded with,

 "That is definitely a Chinese character: 安.  I don't know about in Chinese but in Japanese it is pronounced "an" or "yasu(i)" so maybe it is the last phonetic character of the family name.."

Wow. So my kid really DID write the first part of her name in Chinese.  She IS learning something!  And someone else recognized it!

Later that afternoon, I caught her singing a song I didn't know.  When I asked her what it was, she rolled her eyes (is she 15 or 5?) and said, "It's in CHINESE, mama.  You can't sing Chinese!"  I convinced her to let me video her, so here she is (please excuse the poor video orientation/sound/quality; I did this with my phone, and clearly, I have much to learn).

Of course, after I stopped recording, she told me that it was the "Hello, How are you? I'm fine, Thank You" song.

We can't wait to see what else she learns.  Obviously, her Chinese already surpasses mine.