Pleco, Pleco, Pleco - I love you, Pleco

I met a set of MI parents recently who did not know about Pleco. Their kid has been in MI for quite a few years, but they never heard of it. I don't know how this happened. I cannot stress enough that tools like Pleco and Childroad will make your child's life learning the Chinese language so much better, so much more efficient, and your kid's brain able to immerse in the aspects of the language that are important.

There are a lot of other tedious things that you need to do to learn Chinese well. But counting strokes and looking up characters in a paper dictionary is not it. Pleco takes out all of that stress.

English, Pinyin, handwritten character - Pleco will take all these inputs. With a few upgrades, which are all very cheap, they will give you word associations and sentence examples, too. It also has a voiced pronunciation feature - a feature that many people have liked about the Yellow Bridge Dictionary. But Pleco is more all-inclusive and portable.

I have heard that they have an OCR function that allows you to shine your camera lens on a set of characters and then translate it for you. I heard this was useful for a non-proficient spouse who used it to read travel and transportation signs in China back in the day when Pleco was in its early development.

Who knew. Not me. But since my kid was in K, I've learned to use it as an ABC - and wow! If only we had had such tools as kids!! Perhaps life learning Chinese would not have been as much toil.

Pleco, I love you. Thank you for being so clever. My child is so proficient with your tool that it keeps her moving fast and not crumpling under endless page-flipping. We have it on the iPhone, the iPad, and the Kindle Fire. It's fast, easy, and brilliant.