Sunny Horstmann was born in Taiwan and moved to the U.S. at age 8, so she is a stuck-between-two-worlds kind of guest in terms of being a bit too ABC/ABT for recent immigrants, and a bit too "FOB-y" for actual American-born Mandarin speakers. (Side note: what a throwback it is to hear "FOB: 'fresh off the boat'" again, am I right?)

Although Sunny grew up confident in her own Mandarin speaking abilities, once she became a mother and wanted to raise her own kids in a bilingual environment, she felt daunted by the task and alone in her pursuits. That's what motivated her originally to start her popular Instagram account @spotofsunshinechinese, where she shares advice and creates community for others wanting to pass on Mandarin to their children.

Sunny took things a step further and recently created her own set of kindergarten-level Mandarin teaching materials . She was inspired to make this 31-week, day-by-day curriculum because she recently started teaching her younger son Mandarin and was unable to find a comprehensive curriculum, so she built it herself!

Angela was inspired by and felt such resonance with Sunny, since that is the exact spirit that motivated Angela to create Real You Mandarin in the first place to help ABCs, ABTs, and other advanced Mandarin learners learn how to express their true selves in Mandarin.

In this episode you'll learn vocab like: 不知所措 / bù zhī suǒ cuò / at a loss, 孤單 / gū dān / lonely, and 鳥不生蛋 / niǎo bù shēng dàn / the middle of nowhere.

You can find Sunny on Instagram at @spotofsunshinechinese and click HERE to learn more about her Joyful Beginnings bilingual course materials made for teaching Mandarin to kids ages 3-6. Use code REALYOU for 20% off thru 7/31!

And if you want to give yourself the tools necessary to tackle the emotional and gentle parenting scenarios that are bound to come up in the process of teaching your kids Mandarin, check out our Real You Mandarin: Self-Expression course that teaches you how to discuss the entire range of emotions we experience as multifaceted humans, and also features an entire module dedicated to Fertility & Parenting that can help you work through big feelings and insecurities that your kids may have.

Want the full transcript in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Pinyin, and English with vocab highlighted? Join the Podcast Transcript Membership to unlock all past and future transcripts. Download a free transcript from episode 1 to check out the format before joining. Learn more at https://www.realyoumandarin.com/podcast

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