How to navigate daily life on- and offline without speaking Chinese, some tips.
Once you arrive in China you invariably will be confronted with the struggles of not being able to read, understand or communicate with people or services (assuming you don't speak Chinese yet). Even though Beijing is a very modern city with well-educated inhabitants you won't be able to simply use English or your native language to navigate your daily life.
Many of the most-commonly used APPs are completely in Chinese, signs and information sometimes have Pinying versions but very rarely English translations and, in my experience, it will be very hard to find Chinese people who are able and willing to understand and speak English.
Of course, there are many exceptions, after all, there is simply a huge amount of people living in Beijing, but as a general rule, you will need to find a way to communicate in Chinese.
The easiest and most convenient options I have found for myself so far are the following:
1. WeChat
Make sure to set your WeChat to English and use the APPs very good translation feature to understand the world around you as well as the content on your phone.
In my opinion, the translation by WeChat is usually not too bad in terms of understanding even longer sentences as well as recognizing text from pictures.
As you most likely will be using WeChat anyways every few minutes it is very quick at hand you can use it without activating your VPN.
Click the Plus sign in the upper right corner to open the Dropdown > Choose Scan > On the bottom switch to Translate > Position the camera over the piece of text you would like to have translated > Click the white button. That's it! Sometimes this feature might not properly work if you have a VPN activated but this is the same for most features in Chinese APPs.
You can also choose to translate from a picture saved on your phone by clicking on Album rather than the white button.
The only downside I see to this feature is that you cannot easily use it to translate text in Mini programs opened in WeChat. For that you will need to take a screenshot of the text you would like to translate, exit the Mini program, open the Scan/Translate option and translate the text. Then you back into your Mini programs and look for the place you left off. In this case, you can also use the translate option from Alipay which will require you to click a few times more often but has basically the same functionality:
2. Alipay
The steps here are: Open Alipay > Click on Scan > Select Identify at the bottom > Click on More > Select Translate. You can also choose to take a picture of some text in front of you or select an image or screenshot from your album.
Especially at the beginning of my time here in China, my album was flooded with screenshots of APPs, article detail description pages from Taobao, ingredients, and names of dishes for ordering food, pop-up windows from Homepages, etc.
Just make sure to delete these screenshots from time to time in order to not clutter up your phone too much.
3. iPhone
If you own an iPhone you can use some automatically built-in options to translate text.
The first is in the Messages APP. Simply open a message you received, long click the message text and a window will open with the option to Translate.
The second is the translation from pictures. Go into your Photos APP > Open a photo with text you want to have translated > in the photo long-press the text and pull the blue marker to include all the text you want to have translated > Click the little right arrow in the black navigation bar that will open up and select Translate.
Both of these options rely on the Apple own Translate APP that you can also use to translate text. Here you will need to use the old-fashioned way of typing text in order to have it translated. You will need to type Chinese characters by switching to a Chinese keyword which also means you need to know the Pinying of the characters you want to have translated. This is honestly my least favorite way to translate. You will need to be able to read Chinese characters in order to type-in correctly what you can't understand. When translating from English (or your Mothertongue) to Chinese you will not automatically get the Pinying but only the Chinese characters. You can long-press the Chinese character > Select Look Up from the Menu opening up which will open a dictionary with the Pinying but this does not always work and is a bit complicated.
4. Other APPs
Google Translate
Google Translate is one of my favorite Apps in terms of understanding grammar and translating longer text passages correctly. The AI behind it is very good and it is fast and easy to use. A big downside is that you will need to have your VPN activated in order to have it work.
But once you have done so, Google Translate allows you to translate text live (without taking a picture, just by pointing your phone camera over the text), from pictures, from audio (you can speak directly into the microphone and the APP will recognize the text) and you can draw Chinese characters by hand and have them translated. You are not limited to only translating from English to Chinese but can change to almost any other language.
You can have a whole live conversation with another person with the Conversation feature, by speaking into the APP in English, have the Chinese translation be read out aloud, and then proceed to let your counterpart speak Chinese into the App and have it translated into English.
When using the option to hand-draw Chinese characters, the APP is a bit difficult to handle as it doesn't allow for a lot of time between the strokes until it concludes you are done drawing and is searching for the character closest to what you have drawn, which often results in having to draw again.
Pleco
My so far favorite APP for translating and learning new characters at the same time is Pleco.
This is a Chinese dictionary APP. Especially if you want to hand draw characters and look up the meaning and translation, this APP is ideal. You can directly save each new word as a flash card in order to revisit them later and learn them.
Each word has a very detailed dictionary article outlining the different meanings, and translations, whether it is a Verb, Adjective, or Noun, gives you sample sentences, teaches you the stroke order, and points to related other words.
This APP also works offline in case you don't have reception.
If your goal is not simply translating text but also learning Chinese this is my favorite. You are limited to translating text word by word or fixed expressions so this is not too useful for translating whole sentences.
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