Q: What recreational or extreme sports do you participate in?
A: We (my family) like to try to do all kinds of stuff. We aren’t so much into team sports or anything like that, but individual sports. We enjoy cycling and hiking on the weekends, and when we have time, we like to do other things like skiing. We have been skiing for a while, about seven years now, and just this season we decided to switch it up a little bit and take advantage of a special that Boreal was offering through their 123 Program. So we learned how to snowboard. I’m very bad, and I took quite a few tumbles. I was feeling quite brave, and while I was on the snowboard, I decided to do the half-pipe. I completed the half-pipe, but on my very first run down I tumbled off the edge, which was quite ugly. But very luckily, because I was wearing a helmet, I did not get hurt. So we do skiing, snowboarding, I surf, not very well though. I’ve also been on a zip line in Costa Rica. I have also been rock climbing, and all kinds of stuff. A little here and there just to try it all out so that we end up knowing a little bit of every sport. Our main goal for all of this is personal enjoyment and also to help our son see all kinds of variations of sports so that he is not limited. We find that it is important to have a passion for a healthy lifestyle and a passion for enjoying life. So it is important to us that he gets exposed to it, and we have developed this passion ourselves.

Q: Where do you surf?
A: We are fair weather surfers. You know, like in Hawaii on little baby waves: two-foot, four-foot waves. We have also surfed in Australia, which is very beautiful. We were on a very clean beach with a shark net, so there is no chance of any sharks coming up and thinking you look like a seal or turtle. I felt very safe there, so we are very fair weather surfers.

Q: Is there anything about yourself you would like to share with the Cardinal Newman community, or are there any suggestions you have for the school in the future?
A: What I would really like to see in our modern languages program is an expansion of our language offerings. This would be in addition to the languages we already offer and it would include additional world languages. It can be Arabic, Chinese, anything outside of the romance language group.

Q: How many languages do you speak?
A: All my students want to know how many languages I speak. I never really fully tell them because I ask them to read it online on my school webpage, and put it up as a bonus question on one of the quizzes. I learned Mandarin Chinese as my native language growing up. That was my first language since I was old enough to speak. I have been perfecting it throughout my entire life. I was born in Taiwan, and my family moved to Brazil when I was two. So all the Chinese I do know, which I am very proud of, has been learned at a Chinese school. It was basically Saturday and Sunday school from the time I was six all the way into high school. I learned Brazilian Portuguese because I grew up in Brazil. This is a little different from Portuguese from Portugal but still mutually understandable. I learned Hakka, which is a language my family speaks. It is its own unique language, a Sino-Tibetan language, and a lot of people who don’t know much about it call it a dialect of Chinese. Hakka is really not a dialect of Chinese, but rather an individual language within the Sino-Tibetan language group that Chinese is in as well. When I moved to the states in my teens I learned English in school, and at the same time I was learning English, I was learning Spanish. Then, I also have reading comprehension of French because I have taken an intensive French class in college.
Q: Are you fluent in all these?
A: Well I would say I speak five languages really well, and a couple of other languages that I can listen to and read much better than I can produce and speak so I feel confident in saying that I’m fluent in only five languages.

Mrs. Weng-Reeder: extreme athlete and linguist.