iHuman Chinese 4+

First off, the app works fine for me, including payments. But it definitely isn’t intuitive. It’s tricky to set up if you don’t speak/read Chinese but a WeChat account is free. A Chinese bank isn’t needed. I paid just find using the AppStore like I do everything else (I’m based in the USA). The support they provide is top-notch, I got an email back in just a few hours. They contacted me via chat on wechat, spoke English well, and took screenshots and led me step by step to set it up. They explained the difference between the packages. One of them buys all 1200 characters. The other is a year of VIP status- this unlocks all characters for one to progress through but also unlocks the books they keep adding to the library for users to learn how to read. And they are beautifully illustrated and narrated. FYI It doesn’t say what the characters mean in English. You can guess some of them, but others like “ge” at the beginning not so much. Use a translator or, better yet, a bilingual dictionary and then see which definition the game is teaching at that particular moment. This alone won’t teach a person Chinese. But it’s the best character practice for kids I’ve encountered. 5 stars!

It has 4 steps to learning a word: play, identify, practice, and write. The playing part makes learning fun, and the other steps have fun little reactions in them (like when you write a brushstroke it’s builds a part of a robot). There are so many more fun things beside of word learning like stories with the words in them and a place where you can “fight” others while learning words. There are too many to list!

Living in the US, I have tried many ways to teach my kids Chinese and I would say this app is a pretty well made one. The app teaches the most common characters and their associated words. It also has many simple books that incorporate those words and characters.

Before this app, I was teaching my 4 year old Chinese myself using old fashioned ways and I was not getting very far. After started using this app, my 4 year old was much more interested in learning Chinese.

However, I would advice parents to turn off the “play” stage in the setting. For each character, a kid needs to go through 4 stages “play, recognize, practice, and write” to complete the learning. However, I noticed that my kid was way more interested in “play” than the other 3 stages and the “play” often has addictive games that have very little to do with the character. My husband (who is a seasoned gamer) especially is against my kid playing these games this early. So I turned off “play” for good. Although I can see that this app is not as appealing to my kid as before, it is still an effective tool as a teaching app.