I read an article on the New York Times recently on how tackling remote learning during the various Covid-19 lockdowns taking place at the moment around the work could actually break parents who, while stuck in the same place as their children, are trying to work at the same time. I for one would happen to be one of those parents with a school-going 8-year old studying in a Mandarin-medium school, and Mandarin happens to be a language that I do not usually speak and for the record: I can’t (well, yet… glass half full) read Mandarin.
With exception to English and Bahasa Malaysia, every other subject in my daughter’s school is taught in Mandarin. If you are like me, the key problem to address would be how do you translate stuff, and cue to oft-used slogan: there’s an app for that. I’ve using Pleco on my iPhone for more than a year, and it’s AMAZING. In its free-to-use form, its a Chinese-to-English dictionary (and vice-versa).
However, to cope with school work you’ll definitely want to do what I did: fork out USD 30 for the Basic Bundle add-on in Pleco. Pleco’s Basic Bundle adds a whole bunch of stuff including the ability to accept handwriting input, a stroke-order guide, text to speech, optical character recognition (OCR) and a better dictionary in the form of the Oxford Chinese Dictionary.
The stroke-order guide uses almost the entire screen and that’s a good thing since my daughter will be able to see it without additional visual aids. The text-to-speech function is important as I sometimes don’t even pronounce the Chinese characters correctly even with pin-yin. The OCR helps cut down the time needed to translate chunks of text.
I love the History function which tracks all the words I’ve inputted into Pleco whether through handwriting or OCR, but I think my daughter secretly hates it, it reminds her of ALL the words where she had to ask for help to identify (this one hates showing weakness even at such a young age). On a positive note, I get to use the list for her writing drills.
One curious thing that I’ve noted is that Pleco provides additional context to the text that you are translating, but I’m not sure whether is it due to the purchase of the Basic Bundle. The app can identify Chinese idioms, as well as titles to popular (albeit ancient) Chinese poems.
If there’s a drawback for Pleco, I would say the performance varies from device to device. There’s a noticeable difference running the same OCR function on my phone (an iPhone 11 Pro), where it runs like a dream, vs on the Samsung Galaxy S9, where the OCR is not that great, but usable. In any case, the app is an invaluable teaching tool, so do check it out: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pleco-chinese-dictionary/id341922306
