Zài jiàn, Maevie!

I appear to have severely underestimated my daughter's ability to pick up foreign language skills from TV.  We still haven't watched Dora, I'm not sure why I'm holding out exactly, but I haven't shown it to her yet.  However, I did let her start watching Ni Hao, Kai Lan because it appeared on our Amazon Prime list.

Now, there are a lot of people who wouldn't let their kid watch Kai Lan purely because the look of it is very anime, but Daddy and I are pretty serious anime people and don't see the harm.  And we know how to let the overly cutesy stuff kind of roll off our backs.  And I'm very happy that Kai Lan's favorite animal is a dinosaur - considering how girly she is, that really makes Maeve relate to her.

But this blows my mind.  Maeve loves the show, and it's actually teaching some pretty good lessons that she can use right now - how to be patient, how to calm down when you're angry, how to share, etc.  The mind-blowing bit is how much Mandarin she's picking up from the show. 

One word has been completely swapped in her vocabulary, she now uses tuōxié for slippers. (tw-oh-shee-eh)  And I can even hear in her voice that she's getting the tones, the inflection right.  Mandarin has five different tones (rising, high, low, medium, falling, essentially) and I can hear them when she repeats the words back to Kai Lan.  Yet again, the child has succeeded in exceeding my expectations by a long shot.

Although it still makes me laugh that when Kai Lan says goodbye at the end of the show, she says, "Zài jiàn!" (say chen) and Maeve cheerfully calls back, "jiàn!"  It's like the Chinese version of Say Goodnight, Gracie! and I have to laugh.