Jewelle Tan Personally

Eu has been going to school for more than 4 months now.

It has been interesting for us at home to hear her adventures of learning new things from school - from new words to many new songs which Qi picks up instantly. Let’s just put it this way, there are that much singing at home courtesy of the songs that Eu learnt from school that even their Ah Mah (grandmother) can sing some of their songs.

Her Mandarin has improved tremendously too and although I can understand some basic everyday Mandarin, there has been one occasion when she said something to me and I had to ask her to translate. My husband’s warning that I will soon be lost when my kids start speaking more Mandarin is fast coming true.

But I am in a way luckier than some of the other parents who have nil Chinese background and knows not a word of Mandarin and yet have their kids in a school where Chinese language is dominant.

At least for me, I learn a new word every few months or years judging from my how much I understand Mandarin and I’m sure I will never be that clueless. Unless Eu and Qi learn to converse in poetic Mandarin in which case even their father would be lost, I’m sure!

And 4 months along, I noticed that these few kids still shy away from the rest of the Chinese speaking students including Eu and I wonder what is it like in class for them.

I wondered because I have a cousin who comes from a non-Mandarin speaking household and his first few years in a Chinese school was a funny family story - he would regularly run out from his class. He now speaks passable Mandarin and my aunt is having second thought about having all her kids in a Chinese school as they have began to talk in Mandarin around her.

And I have another cousin who has not an ounce of Chinese blood and yet has mastered the language so well that she won an award as the best speaker in a statewide debate competition in Mandarin some time ago.

So I will not be surprised if these few students who now communicate with Eu with a combination of body languages and face expressions, might even speak the language better than her in a few years.

This will be an interesting thing to watch.

JPPMom led me to Mumsgather and I thought I’ll share my opinion on what I expect from a pre-school, to help an undergraduate student who is doing a research on this.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was told of an amusing story today.

Because our district is very small and roads are fews, we tend to drive past the same cars often, learn to recognize a person from their cars and if you are extra observant, you’d even know a household’s changes or latest additions.

This was how I, or rather my husband, noticed that a certain household in my neighbourhood recently sported a swanky new car in their garage.

When I commented on this to my family, I was told that this car was acquired to give the owner a more respectable standing.

Apparently, because he drove a modest car before this, he had trouble convincing certain people that he belongs to a very important committee - which is perhaps because most of the other committees came in with not only expensive cars but were probably chauffeured.

It doesn’t matter that he has the documents to prove his membership because his very ordinary and relatively cheap car obviously tell these group of people that he could not be someone in such important position.

In short, cheap car = no money = NOBODY!

Lucky for this man, he was able to get himself a car that equates his standing and command the respect that he deserves.

But isn’t it sad that some of us would quickly judge a person’s social standing based on his material possessions - his car, clothes, watches and etc.

Don’t they know that some of those who drive prestigious cars like BMWs have more red than black in their accounts and some that drive simple cars like Madzas have very long numbers in their accounts?

It’s Good Friday today and most Catholic churches all over the world would be having their mass at 3.00 pm today.

I said most churches because today, I passed by a church which was having their Good Friday mass at 6.45 pm. Along Queen Street was a old church called St. Joseph’s and there, as expected, were a lot of people standing outside the church.

What was unexpected to me was, across the two lane street and above the balconies of the shoplots directly opposite the church were devotees following the mass through a huge screen placed outside the church building.

How convenient for those who lives in those flats - as they need only open their door, walk to the right balcony and attend the mass. None of those need-to-be-in-church-two-hours-before-or-else-no-seat kind of thing.

By the way, in case you’re wondering where on earth is Queen Street in Brunei - we are in Singapore, of course!

When I said I had NO help in setting up my blog in this domain - of course you don’t think that I meant it literally?

Of course I had help and I’m going to share with you some of the things I learn over the last few days.

Some of them will seem very basic for the experts so think of this as the idiot’s guide. Besides, I need to record this down because I will definitely forget it by next week.

1) Get Lilian’s simple 15 steps guides.

If not because of this guide, I would not attempt to do it myself. It’s not all self-explanatory but at least if you’re not sure, you know what to read on.

2) If you’re still deciding on your host, get one with Fantastico.

Not all comes with this but it makes installing Wordpress easy (the alternative is uploading Wordpress using “ftp” - and you don’t want to go there…)

3) Buy and pay your domain name straightaway.

I actually bought another name but didn’t confirmed the payment till the next day - and by then it was “stolen”! Lucky me, I actually regretted my original name and the domain name thief actually “saved” me…

4) Research and Read
I didn’t ask anybody for help because I wanted to try it out myself (even though it actually took me AGES to figure out that my cPanel and Wordpress are not related…) but of course, there are loads of kind folks out there who has written guides on what to do - read, read and read!

So far, it is still confusing but all in all, it’s been kind of fun!