Teaching kindy kid English and learning along the way

If your son is going into kindy or their first year of school, it will mostly be teaching him to write and read. I’m sure helping him with his reading and writing homework, if he gets any, will help you write and speak a bit more local. If the school doesn’t give him work to do at home, a library would be a good place to start too, there is a lot of kid friendly books!

Immerse yourself in English language media. If your vocabulary and grammar are already ok, and you want to sound more native to your local accent, then find recordings of people speaking in your target accent and dialect (local news, podcasts, etc) and play it over and over while repeating what they are saying until you sound more like they do. If there are sounds you really struggle to make (eg English R), speech therapists can give you exercises to practice. You can also look on YouTube for videos of speech therapy for specific sounds (phonemes) if you can’t get an appointment with a therapist easily. And don’t forget to teach your kid your native language too 😁

I went to a high school with many Asian students. Several of them were ESL students who learned English well enough to get into Honors English, though many of them found reading books with unorthodox spellings to be very annoying. (For example. Mark Twain's *The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,* which spells words as how they are pronounced in various accents) Then there was Wendy. Not only was Wendy in Honors English but she sounded so much like a native that she had an extremely difficult time convincing people that she had VERY strict and "traditional" Chinese parents. Success is definitely possible--though it may thoroughly confuse other people. (Life is like that sometimes.) You might also be able to get advice from Evildea, a YouTuber from Australia. He's quite interested in languages; is probably the most famous YouTuber in the Esperanto-speaking community, he's learning Chinese so he can talk to his Chinese in-laws, and he's done English tutoring on and off. (Don't worry about his name starting with Evil-; he just has an offbeat sense of humor.) He tells the story of how he semi-accidently became the private full-time tutor for the child of a rich Chinese programmer for a year in this video \[nsfw-ish warning, two minor swear words\] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE39YnvA5VE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE39YnvA5VE) Lately, Evildea has been making a series of videos on learning languages. I don't know if he can help you directly, but he does have a tutoring experience and is currently making videos on how to learn languages. (His main advice: there is no instant shortcut; fluency comes with lots and lots of practice.)