Is internation kindergarten really necessary?

I was talking about Grade 6+ (~10 years and older); getting into those grades are not that difficult while P1 is the big challenge.

Specifically for the OP and others who were curious, this works well for what we did and for anyone wishing to follow.
We did Cantonese kindie followed by Mandarin primary and then transition into a mostly English school at around 10 years old. Still have an 8 year old in KCS doing Mandarin immersion while the older 2 kids are now doing mostly English.
 
My son's kindergarten (a very traditional local Chinese kindergarten) has quite a number of western/ non-Chinese kids too. I have learnt that they speaks Chinese just like the other Chinese kids do.
My understanding is that young kids, especially kindergarten kids are amazingly good in picking up almost any languages in a much faster pace than we can imagine, so long as you give them the language environment.
 
Let's also be honest about this whole 'bilingual/trilingual' thing. Different people have different levels of what they consider fluency in a language. If your kid is Chinese looking, speaking whatever Cantonese he would get in kindergarten immersion only and then back to the US, no one is going to take him for a native speaker unless that is supplemented with something else at some point. If not reinforced, he could also lose whatever language abilities he has or they could be reduced to a pretty elementary level. Would that be enough to do things like talk to grandparents about school, what's for dinner, take a taxi, etc? Sure. But, and take Mandarin now as an example, would learning immersion level Mandarin just for primary school prepare one for doing business with native speakers? No, very unlikely.

So, it is definitely easiest to INTRODUCE a language and get a very basic level of fluency at a young age. But be realistic about what that means as your child gets older and is taken from an immersion environment and what it means in terms of conversational fluency vs. professional fluency. Also, if your kid is non-Asian looking, standards are a lot lower for fluency. I know white people at work who can say 'nihao' and get people fawning over their Chinese speaking skills, whereas BBCs or even HKers speak passable conversational Mandarin but get told their level of fluency is insufficient in a professional setting.
 
Actually after visiting City Kids we decided we didn't like the environment very much. It was in an very old building with 2 other organizations. We then applied Woodland Pre-school Mid-level and got a spot. Now, after reading all your posts again, I decided local stream might be better for us, after all that was one of our goal moving back to Hong Kong. And we can always switch him back to international school. I called Wisely and Lingnan Kindergartner and they all sounded nice, but we are thinking of a local kindergarten in Kowloon side, if you have any recommendations, we really appreciate it.
 
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