We grew up in two independent language ecosystems, one in English and the other in Mandarin Chinese. My parents, who emigrated from Taiwan at 11-12 years of age, provide us a Chinese Language Ecosystem (CLE) at home and speak to us mostly in Chinese, particularly my dad, who claims that his Chinese has gotten a lot better raising us! We learned Chinese primarily at home, since we lived at least an hour away from the nearest weekend Chinese school in North Carolina. We were home-schooled for a year and half during primary school but otherwise attended either all English private or public school. We studied Chinese using Chinese language arts (CLA) textbooks from Taiwan for about 45 minutes a day, 4-5 days a week in primary school. During our middle school years, less time was focused on studying Chinese, particularly since we needed to catch up in English. In all, we got through sixth grade CLA textbooks by 8th grade, roughly. We focused much more on reading than writing.
For a few years of our primary school years, we stayed with our grandparents in Taiwan for a good part of the summer and attended public school there for the month of June. We also read a lot in Chinese and watched cartoons and movies mostly in Chinese in primary school. My dad always said that it was important for us to be able to express ourselves fluently in Chinese between the ages 4 and 8 and be able to read comics in Chinese by the end of third grade, basically before we can read Harry Potter in English (or other enticing novels).
應用中文 (Applied Chinese) 