I bought one AM99 Electronic English Chinese Dictonary as a Christmas gift for my eleven year old daughter who is learning Chinese. She absolutely loves it. I asked her why she liked it so much. She said: “It helps me to do my homework”. So I sat down not too far from her one day watching her doing homework. I summarize a few points here.

1) Which character to use?
If she doesn’t know how to write a character, but she knows the English meaning, she’d type in the English word in the dictionary, and then look for the character. Another way is that she forgets a character but knows its pinyin, she’d type in the pinyin to find the character.

2) How to pronounce a character?
When she reads, but then sees a character that she doesn’t know how to pronounce. She then figures out the radicals and the number of strokes of the character, enters those in the dictionary, and then press a button, the dictionary will pronounce it in mandarin. It also shows the pinyin.

3) A booklet of essential Chinese
It comes with a booklet of essential Chinese. She thinks that it’s easy for her, since she has been in Chinese school for a few years now.

I am really glad that I bought her this learning device. It’s a helping hand, and she learns to rely on herself to study Chinese. It’s not a headache any more to find the correct characters, and not knowing how to say a character she hasn’t learn or forgets.