My children are all learning Chinese and each week, they have a spelling list to learn. Sometimes, there are words they have forgotten how to read, much less understand its meaning. I am not good in the language myself and get stumped when they ask me what an unfamiliar word means. A free and simple tool that can help your children is: Google Translate.
Google Translate can help you translate texts whether you are trying to understand a poster overseas, a foreigner or a website in another language. If you haven’t tried it yet, here is a step by step guide on how to use it with your phone. You can check out my video guide too.
First, you need to download the google translate app to your mobile phone.
Once you open the app, you will see this interface below.
- Choose and download the language you want translated. In my case, it is Chinese. The double arrow indicates that you will be translating Chinese to English. If you switch the arrows, English will be translated into Chinese.
- Next, choose the camera function.
- Once you hover your phone camera over the text, you will see that the text is automatically translated into English.
- Choose the scan function, then press the round button to scan the text.
- You will see all the words marked up as shown in the next picture.
- Now, use your finger to highlight the words you want to learn. If you need help with the whole text, click ‘select all’ at the bottom.
- You will see all the words you selected showing up in the 2 bars at the top.
- Click on the arrow at the blue bar. You will then see all the selected words and their English translation below.
- To listen to the Chinese words, click on the sound icon at the top right hand corner, just above the Chinese text. Your child now knows how the word sound and its meaning.
- He or she can should then practise writing out the words and commit them to memory for their spelling quiz.
- If you know how to write Chinese characters, you can input the text via the handwriting option. To do that, go back to the home interface.
- Then click the pen icon as shown in the image. A box will pop up at the bottom for you to hand write the word there for translation.
We have used Google Translate on a variety of texts like Chinese story books, magazines and posters. Explore the ‘Conversation’ function too as it translates speech and is amazingly accurate. I have even used Google Translate to read cooking instructions, ingredient lists, manuals in foreign languages.
Google Translate on other Devices
Google Translate can be used on your computer and tablets too. It is easy to copy and paste texts into Google Translate. When my children need to do their second language homework set on their school’s online learning platform, they use the web version to understand certain Chinese instructions or texts they don’t understand. Many people also don’t know that you can visit a foreign language website and translate everything there. What you need to do is to use the Chrome browser to open the webpage. Then right click to open the list of options. You will see a ‘translate’ option.
If you want to learn more about how to use Google Translate, you can get detailed information from the help centre. Hope this post helps all the mothers out there struggling to help their kids with second language learning.
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