How to guide children in Mandarin homework if you don't even know one word in Mandarin

Guiding my child in his Mandarin homework is like…..

Luckily I have Pleco, the Chinese dictionary in my Android. I’m so much in love with this app. It is so easy to use. All Julian has to do if he wants to know the meaning of certain Mandarin character, is just to draw them on the screen.

I could say it is 99% accurate as it can identify the character you are drawing even if you the ugliest handwriting in the world (ok, that’s a bit too much). But still, I think it’s a great app, as you pick the correct character at the bottom of the app and out came the definition in English.

And, for some reason, the app can’t recognize your handwriting, you can use the OCR feature. Using your phone’s camera and a yellow box as your guide, point it at the character and the app will try to detect the strokes of the character and you’ll get the translation in pinyin (pinyin is roman spelling of the chinese phrase).

Type out the pinyin phrases and you'll get the definition.

But depending on the app alone is not enough. So, for non-mandarin speaker, it’s better to send children to a mandarin tuition class or on a one-to-one tuition.

Julian previous tuition teacher advice to;

* Expose children to a Mandarin-speaking environment

* If you let your children watch cartoon on television, let them watch once in a while, cartoon in Mandarin audio (at astro channel).

* As parent, I think it’s a good thing to learn with them. Try to learn a few easy Mandarin phrases; such as good morning or how‘s your day at school like; and try to communicate with them at home.

After all, we want the best for our children.