Chinese Letter Academy

　“My Chinese Copybook”, recommended by app stores in 14 countries as one of the “Best New Apps”, is exclusively designed for children to learn stroke order when writing Chinese characters. “Chinese Letter Academy” is an upgraded version of “My Chinese Copybook”. In addition to adopting the widely recognized learning strategies, a dictation function is added with an expanded letter library Parents can now purchase the words selectively according to their needs.
After purchasing tokens on the app store and activating the download function with them, parents can select suitable words and download the desired items to their accounts. They can decide the dictation content as well. Our interactive app can turn a stressful and dreaded revision process into an interesting game.
Apart from writing characters correctly, stroke order, the writing pattern generated according to the construction of an individual Chinese character, is one of the most important elements that children have to learn when mastering the art of handwriting from kindergarten. Writing characters in the correct stroke order can greatly facilitate the learning of the spatial relationships and thus produce visually appealing characters; what’s more important, correct stroke order is vital for beginners to memorize the character’s composition, so that when they write they will not miss a stroke or two.

Learning to copy Chinese characters according to a certain order provides children with clear ideas about where to start to write, and the direction as well as the sequence of the strokes. When children write on the screen of a tablet or a smartphone with their little fingers, they concentrate more on learning the stroke order because they do not have to experience the difficulty of holding a pencil.

In this system, the stroke orders are strictly based on the Lexical Items with English Explanations for Fundamental Chinese Learning in Hong Kong Schools published by Chinese Language Education Section, Curriculum Development Institute, Education Bureau, HKSAR in 2009, and their List of Graphemes of Commonly-used Chinese Characters: 2007 Re-arranged with Cantonese and Putonghua Pronunciations and Simple English Explanations published in 2012.

Functions:
• Commonly used words in kindergartens are available in the letter library. More words are coming soon.
• Parents can use tokens to pay just for the words they need without purchasing them all.
• This program enables parents to decide the dictation content, making it the best revision companion for their children.
• This program provides a reasonable number of reminders. Children can learn the stroke order of Chinese characters in a progressive way.
• This program will make sure that the children can finish writing every character according to the correct stroke order. Consequently, parents do not have to squeeze in monitoring their children’s practice.
• This exercise book can display children’s daily accomplishments, and even put all their work on the same character in a line to show their progress.
• There is a time limit! Seeing parents and their children fighting over the use of electronic gadgets is the last thing we want, because after all, we encourage children to learn with fun! Hence, we suggest that before doing the activities, parents and children agree on a time limit for the activity. Once the time is up, the children should take at least a 30 minute break before working on the activity again.