"Nathen, will you help me with my Chinese homework please?"
"Champagne, I can't even speak Thai."
"But you can do anything."
"NOOOOOOOOO, not the eyes. Don't do the eyes, Champagne!"
But she did...
In all my 55 years, I have been asked for many things, many times, but NEVER have I been asked to help anyone with their Chinese homework...
Online school is proving stressful. For me at least. Nine-year-old Champagne is loving it as despite missing her friends at school, lessons are all online and she has super Uncle Nathen to do help her with all her homework and guide her through the live classwork. Her grades are through the roof! Four one-hour live lessons a day plus an offline class and a stack of (already at) homework is keeping me busy, not to mention with Champagne staying at ours from Monday to Friday, extra cooking and cleaning, but it's all a new experience and we love having her here.
It's not so much the work, although I do think they teach Maths in a very odd way, but it's getting to grips with Google Classroom and Zoom. Both are very clumsy interfaces and uploading homework is a case of doing the work in the textbook, taking a photo on the phone and uploading it! The teachers are thicker than I am and seem unable to grasp the principle of sharing PDF files to edit, so taking photos it is.
She goes to a small international school and follows a basic English curriculum, apart from the mandatory Thai, and Thai history lessons.
She also studies Chinese...
...which is very common here as many kids have Chinese heritage, in Champagne's case, her Grandad who is first generation. He also pays the school bills! Chinese lessons it is then!
It has to be said that Champagne is struggling with the Chinese. Studying everything in English when her Dad only speaks intermediate English and Mum barely any English at all is difficult enough, especially when the person who has been teaching her English since the age of 2, is me!
They really push their kids through education here, far too much in my opinion but old family tradition and culture still holds true here.
Anyway, back to the Chinese...
Now I didn't actually work out how to do this, that was Champagne who suggested I took a picture and used Goggle to translate it. Pretty clever when she isn't even allowed her own phone yet!
Up until this point, I'd watched as she'd recited the numbers one to ten and endlessly copied characters as she learned how to form them, except she hadn't, she had learned how to copy them, but this was different. We had to put the right Chinese word against the right picture and to make it even more tricky, there were 6 words and only 5 pictures...
And here it is, this week's Chinese homework! Anybody have any idea? (Sit down please @livinguktaiwan. I should have just asked you in the first place!)
So what I did was take a picture on my phone using Google Lens, hit translate and suddenly it becomes a whole lot clearer...
Now technically, it's not really cheating as she still did the exercise albeit in a different language than the one intended but even so, I should have a little 'morals' chat with her!
She copied the characters into the right questions, and we did a double check...
JACKPOT!
Google gets a lot of bad press over its security issues and never-ending quest to get its hands on your personal data and information but damn is it good at life 'stuff'
And that's how you cheat at Grade 3 Chinese! Now I think we've just got science, grammar and life skills homework to finish.
Life skills, my girl is going to be good at that, even if she will never be able to speak Chinese!
Life skills, my girl is going to be good at that, even if she will never be able to speak Chinese!
Full marks!!!! Who needs Uncle Nathen when you have Uncle Google!!! 😄
Ok, maybe she still does, as I doubt Uncle Google's English is as good as Uncle Nathen
Seriously, how in god's name do you learn this? When I was spending a lot of time in HK, I remember watching my friend typing and writing Cantonese...incredible! Do you speak Cantonese and Mandarin?
As ocd are trying to move content into niche communities where pertinent, may I encourage you to post in the HomeEdders community for this kind of content? There is also the Education community for more general education content.
Thank you for the suggestion. Have a great weekend ;-)
