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Learning Chinese Idioms and Grammar While Making a Healthy Treat

I often transform cauliflowers into comfort foods like fried rice or disguise them as hash browns to meet my family's nutritional needs. What used to be a solo kitchen task has now become a delightful duo effort. My little helper, Henry, has been learning and enjoying the process!

 

Henry loves getting hands-on with the manual blender and transferring the riced cauliflower into our food storage box. He eagerly anticipates his favourite outcome – hash browns!

 

He sweetly calls them "mommy hash browns". During our recent cooking adventure, some florets got stuck at the blades. Drawing on his prior blender experience, Henry suggested we reverse the grating direction to free the trapped florets. His initial suggestion was missing the object, but I quickly understood what he meant. I encouraged him to complete his sentence by adding the object noun at the end, which was "direction", and had him repeat the full sentence.

 

A little more language learning followed as I taught him about the "subject" and "object" in a sentence.

When we were more than halfway through our task, I decided to share a fun Chinese idiom "7788", which is a playful way of saying something is 70%-80% completed, to paint a picture of our progress.

 

Henry, always full of curiosity and creative thoughts, playfully asked if we could say "1122" at the beginning of any process. Hearing his imaginative idea, I chuckled and explained that while we can't officially change the idiom in that way, some people have a fun tradition of saying "8899" when they're just about finished with a task.

 

And guess what? There's even a catchy six-word phrase (you can see it in the upper-left corner of the photo) to describe an idea or a plan that hasn't even kicked off yet. Now, Henry, being a fan of "hash browns" over "fried rice", preferred to grate the cauliflowers into a powder form rather than rice-sized pieces.

 

As we chatted about rice and powder, we had a fun time practicing the pronunciation of "rice" and "powder," two words that sound remarkably similar. In both Cantonese and Mandarin, these two words share the same starting and ending consonants, differing only in their vowels and tones.

 

After getting the hang of using blenders, Henry's even started to switch between the names of manual and electronic blenders in Cantonese like a pro. In the end, our cauliflower grating session turned into a delightful parent-child bonding experience, fostering healthier eating habits, and serving as a fun way to practice the Chinese language.

 

Sure, there was a bit of clean-up to do, but the joy we shared made every moment completely worth it.

You probably had a similar experience where preparing food turned into a quality bonding and learning time with your child. However, I still hope my sharing has provided new inspiration for your culinary journeys with your little ones.

 

Happy cooking, bonding, and language learning!

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