Uyghur or English?

I remember I had hard times when I was studying English. Four-hour-a-week college English classes were rigid and boring. English classes were taught in Chinese, so that we had to study Chinese well before we study English. I remember the arduous journey to the graduate school here with research assistantship. Toefl was ok, but GRE really took me a lot of time. Even today, I have hard times with my writing. My advisor encourages me and helps me a lot. But it is hard to explain a brand new idea to some stubborn people and convince them. Sometimes!

My four years old daughter has been in preschool for almost two years, where everybody speaks English. Except for the first month, she did not have any problem with the English thing. It took her only two months to study what I have studied in years. Now I have problem with her Uyghur. She speaks Uyghur very well now. But recently it made me very concerned that she sometimes can’t even name some simple things in Uyghur. If I don’t remind her, she will answer my questions in English. I ignore her English questions, so that she has to ask me in Uyghur. Everyday I spend like 30 minutes to read Uyghur books, teach Uyghur Alphabet, or listen to something on bilqut.com. It helps but not much. The main problem is that we have no Uyghur children around here. The only time my daughter speaks Uyghur is when she is with us, but that is much less than enough.

Few days ago, I taught her to write our names in Uyghur. The picture shows what she wrote on the whiteboard in my office. Hope she can learn it fast!