San Jose Chinese School

I suppose I may as well write something for my alma mater. I grew up through the system here before it moved to Leland High School (they used to rent out John Muir Middle School), and although I didn’t particularly enjoy going to school on Saturday mornings, I have no regrets now. Things have probably changed significantly since then, but I remember a lot of rote memorization to learn Chinese words, and I also remember learning culture and a little bit of history along with it. All my teachers were nice, and I liked that they used both the pinyin system and also bopomofo (or zhu yin fu hao). I think it would have also been nice to have learned to recognize simplified Chinese as well, but there’s something beautiful and poetic about traditional too. Personally, I think going to school was a good way to learn a second language, without it being a huge time commitment.