The first 10 videos of BunFun are now published! A baby step for what I hope to be a long journey of learning, sharing and giving.
Cantonese is my first language, but I only realised how strongly it connects me to a bigger community after I moved to Europe. I always wanted to create something to help promoting the use of Cantonese but it always ended up in the backlog.
Then my son was born.
Like many parents raising a child in a multilingual family, I've been using the strategy of speaking Cantonese to him whenever he is with me. But kids are so quick to learn which languages are spoken in his surroundings, and suddenly one day, my 2-year-old declared to me that he was not going to speak in Cantonese anymore. =(
The worry was very real, and it's not the first time I heard about the reluctance of learning/speaking Cantonese for children growing up in the west. But when it comes to my own boy, I want to do something about it.
These something and something added together is BunFun. It starts as a YouTube channel frankly because that is what my son loves to watch, and learned a lot of words from. But I believe it's the most accessible channel where fellow parents can utilise to sneak in some Cantonese content in young children's screen-time 😝. I also believe (although I don't know how I feel about it yet) that the future of education and learning happens online. If we want children to speak our (spoken) language, we need to speak their (platform) language.
So this is a little backstory of how BunFun came to being. I have many ideas for the future, and I hope one day I'll look back to see it all comes back to this step I took.
Cheers,
Mandy