[MLBW]

My son is still quite young at 9 months. My husband is Hong Kong Chinese and his first and most comfortable language is Cantonese but he also speaks English really well and is comfortable with it. I am not Chinese and do not speak Cantonese so we speak English all the time at home.

However, my son spends a lot of time with his grandparents (my husband's parents) and they speak only Cantonese with him. When he was about five months old he started saying some simple English words like "hand" and "apple."

At about seven months old he said his first Cantonese phrase which happened to be "Hui gai gai" or "Going out" because that is a frequent phrase his grandparents say to him.

At home my husband speaks in Cantonese to our son sometimes as well.

I think it's all about exposure. If you can't speak Cantonese it's a good idea to get your child into a Cantonese-speaking environment on a consistent basis. I think there are these types of classes and playgroups widely available in Hong Kong and I'm sure people on this board can make some good recommendations.

Oh, and when it comes to writing--all I know from talking to my Chinese friends who also can write Chinese is that learning Chinese characters takes a lot of time and the only system really available is to learn by route memory. I studied Mandarin Chinese--and had to take my tests in Chinese--I just remember having to write and memorize Chinese characters for hours upon hours. Of course, I was a lot older when I had to do that--but, if you want your child to be able to be fully literate in Chinese it's a good idea to start young and just keep with it. It takes a lot of work to become truly literate in Chinese--there are a lot of native-speaking Chinese people who still don't do so well with the written language when it comes to more complex sentences etc. I think that there must be some sort of class/playgroup for this sort of thing too, right?