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Learning mandarin in an engaging way: Ihuman Chinese App (洪恩识字)

Being parents, one area which we are very concerned about is the amount of Chinese Hunter is exposed to.

I came from a dialect speaking family, and PL speaks mostly English at home too. So we hope to give Hunter a Mandarin speaking environment (much to the chagrin of many people) since we tend to mix some English vocabulary into our daily Mandarin conversation.

Friends and neighbours recommended the Ihuman Chinese app to us, raving about its effectiveness. We tried out the trial version, and eventually paid a lifetime subscription for it after much deliberation.

Payment
First, I must state that the payment method is very efficient for apple users who can read Chinese, but not so much for non-Chinese since all the instructions are in Chinese.

It is also relatively cheap as we are able to subscribe to a lifetime membership. If Hunter uses it consistently, we would reap ALOT of benefits since they teach up to 1300 words. (If Hunter learns a word a day, that's going to be about 3.5 years!)

Design
The design of the app is very colourful with may interactive features.
It caters more towards pre schoolers, and I started this journey with Hunter since he was about 3.5 years old (though I really doubt I could finish all the words before P1).

Learning Approach
There are 4 phases to learning each character:

1. Play 玩

For this section, the kid gets to play a mini game.

2. Recognition 认

For this section, there is a quick explanation on the character and the kid would have to pull the correct characters into the sentence shown on the screen.

3. Practise 练

For this section, the kid is expected to choose the correct character from 4 options

4. Writing 写

For this section, the kid gets to trace the character 3 times.

Our approach (after a lot of trial and error)
We switched off the option for Practise as Hunter likes to anyhow choose the charaters (to see the interactive elements).

So what we did was to let him play the game, assist to re-form the sentence and write. Depending on the word and his mood, it could be a breeze (or a torture). On good days, we could cover about 3 character. On bad days, we just do revision on his favourite characters (or games)

This is one of the mini games

Tracing the character

 What we like about it

1. Since the learning is by characters, it doesn't take a lot of time to learn a new one.

2. They also helps in revision by giving a mini assessment every day.

3. The mini games (or activities) are very captivating.

4. There is no Han Yu Pin Yin.


What could be improved

1. An option to switch off certain characters. We are facing the issue of character favoritism, where Hunter will keep choosing the same characters which he already knows and keep playing them over and over again.

2. To include phrase recognition. As the learning is all by single characters, we have to put in additional effort to piece the words together to form understanding. As all Chinese speakers would know, many of the characters are paired together to form a word.

Summary

We like this app and it's one of the ways we get Hunter to learn new characters. After learning them, we will apply his new knowledge by getting him to read the characters (whenever we are reading to him).I was pretty surprised at the effectiveness of it, and it seems really true that kids soak up knowledge like sponges.

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