Mandarin praise songs on YouTube – I want to copy these to my computer and upload them to her iPod Touch.
Dirpy – This tool enables you to download YouTube videos (or just the audio from them) so you can put them on an iPod. I want to do this with the praise songs above, and also with some English Language Learners videos.
Hillsong Praise Songs in Mandarin – LOVE this! I loaded these onto Xia’s iPod and some of the songs were familiar to her by the time we first attended church after she was home. This is also available on iTunes.
Flashcards Deluxe – This is an inexpensive app we’re using to teach English vocabulary we want her to learn. You can manage your cards online and each “card” can have up to five sides. So you can flip one card over from the Chinese characters, to the pinyin, to the written English word, to a picture of it, to the English audio pronunciation.
Duibuqi – This is a British band based in Taiwan, and many of their songs are in Mandarin. This one is very mellow and fun, and the main lyric is “I’m sorry my Chinese is bad!” It always puts a smile on our teen’s face, even when she’s otherwise feeling grumpy.
Setting up an iPod Touch – We got our daughter one of these so we could use Google Translate and she could have music. We added in Chinese handwriting recognition so she could write characters on the Touch. We also locked it down so that she cannot access email, internet, YouTube, QQ, or the App Store. Here are instructions on how to do that for your child.
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Mandarin profanity – we discovered a few phrases our daughter uses are foul, and now that we know, we can correct her. Of this list, the ones we’ve heart are “gwo pee” (bullsh!t), “bee zoouh” (shut up – not profane but not allowed in our house), and “nyo bee” (cow’s lady bits). The last one was of particular concern because it’s very nasty and our other kids were repeating it.