In today’s day and age, it seems like every week there’s a nifty new app that will gives you the lowest price on groceries, access to better shared cars and taxis, and translates languages more quickly and accurately. But there are some true essentials that lead the pack, which are pretty indispensable for maximising life here in Beijing.

JSS
Designed with expats in mind and focusing on high-quality English customer service, JSS offers same-day grocery and food delivery from expat-friendly restaurants and grocery stores like Jenny Wang’s. JSS truly tries to connect with its customers, which is why it launched its Brand Ambassador program.

Sherpa’s
Sherpa’s provides a food and grocery delivery service but only works with top-quality restaurants, which means a less wide range of options compared to its Chinese-language counterparts but mainly consists of western-friendly selections. Sherpa’s couriers are trained to ensure a quick, courteous, and correct delivery.

Meituan
Meituan is one of several local food and grocery delivery apps that gets the job done when you’re in a pinch. They generally deliver within the hour and offer a much wider range of restaurants and grocery stores than the earlier two expat-friendly English language apps, if you can navigate its Chinese interface. Plus, you can also rent the yellow Meituan shared bikes using this app!

JingDong (JD)
In the realm of shopping, JD is great for household products and groceries, where you can find almost everything from spinach to stereos. It’s a Chinese-language app but if you can figure it out, it could save you lots of time and effort searching for a brick-and-mortar store for what you need.

Weidian
This is WeChat’s answer to TaoBao, which offers listings by small local business owners with artisanal crafts, foodstuffs, or supplies. Sustainable brands started by expat entrepreneurs such as The Bulk House, KIYANI Botanics, Greeniche, Dancing Yak Handicrafts and The Green Room are some examples of stores you can find on it.

TaoBao
TaoBao is so ubiquitous that it needs no introduction. And if you were first introduced to BaoPals – the English language expat-friendly version of the local app – you really should try TaoBao because of its easy image search function, which we explain in this article here.

Xianyu
A sister to TaoBao, Xianyu is the secondhand version of the popular shopping app and offers plenty of gently-used, practically new clothes, furniture, and other goods. This is great for kids’ stuff which they tend to outgrow quickly. This article tells you all about it!

Dazhong Dianping
Dazhong Dianping or simply Dianping, is essentially what I call the Chinese Yelp, which offers guides for lifestyle and entertainment including restaurants, hotels, cinemas, through business listings, ratings system, and comments section. You can check the app for reviews and recommended specials before you choose a restaurant, helping you and your family to avoid unpleasant surprises. Additionally, paying through the app usually grants you a discount.

Dear Translate
This is editor Mina Yan’s pick of all the free translation apps that are out there right now, and there are a lot. It has a camera translate function that quickly translates the text in front of you and also has an awesome conversation translation function. Best of all, of course, it’s free!

Pleco Chinese Dictionary is probably the best offline Chinese – English dictionary. It integrates dictionaries with an amazing amount (over 110,000) of frequently-updated entries and example sentences with Pinyin, document reader, flashcard system with fullscreen handwriting input, and a live Optical Character Reader (OCR). It also includes audio to help your pronunciation and displays stroke order diagrams showing you how to draw each character.

Tell us which apps you can’t live without here in Beijing (aside from WeChat and Alipay…) in the comments below!

KEEP READING: 5 Free Learning Apps to Help Level Up During Summer

Images: Pexels, Vivienne Tseng-Rush

Living in China, it’s easy to take for granted how easy life is thanks to the rapidly evolving mobile app market. There’s just about an app for everything to help make a life a little bit more convenient. Below is my selection of commonly used apps that provide various services including ordering food, online shopping, and easy to use mandarin dictionaries to guarantee a bit of ease as you settle into your new life in China.

Alipay
Alipay is one of the two most-used online payment apps—the other is WeChat pay. Almost everything can be paid by Alipay once you get your bank account linked: ordering food, booking train or flight tickets, or paying the electricity bill… It’s truly life-changing! Besides this, without Alipay, there is no Taobao.

Air Matters
Sadly, air pollution is still a problem that haunts Beijing from time to time. As such, getting real-time air quality information from Air Matters becomes a part of the daily routine for people living in the city. This app informs you when to wear a pollution mask as it monitors the PM2.5 concentration in the air at any given moment.

Sherpa’s
Sherpa’s provides a food delivery service but only works with top quality restaurants, which means a less wide range of options compared to its Chinese-language counterparts but mainly consists of western-friendly selections. Sherpa’s couriers are trained to ensure a quick, courteous, and correct delivery. Currently, it is only available in Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou. They also have an online website for convenient access.

Pleco Chinese Dictionary
Pleco is probably the best offline Chinese – English dictionary. It integrates dictionaries with an amazing amount (over 110,000) of frequently-updated entries and example sentences with Pinyin, document reader, flashcard system with fullscreen handwriting input, and live Optical Character Reader (OCR). It also includes audio to help your pronunciation and displays stroke order diagrams showing you how to draw each character.

Metro China Subway
Metro China Subway might be the most helpful metro app that provides accurate metro maps and information, route plans that include time and fare information. No network connection needed. It covers most big cities in China such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing, and Tianjin. As subways grow and become more popular and more convenient to use, this app is a must-have.

Ctrip
Ctrip is loaded with everything you need for going on a perfect holiday—flight and train tickets, hotel reservations, and even whole holiday packages according to your budget. You can narrow the search results for hotels with handy filters such as price range, city districts, and facilities, and reviews from verified hotel guests will help you make a better choice. For flight bookings, you are also able to find cheap flights by filtering the price, duration, departure, or arrival.

Dianping
Dianping, which is essentially China’s answer to Yelp, offers guides for living and entertainment including restaurants, hotels, cinemas, and bars, through basic information and an interactive comments section. You can check the app for the reviews and recommended specials before you choose a restaurant, helping you and the family to avoid unpleasant surprises. Additionally, paying through the app usually grants you a discount. (Chinese-only)

XE Currency Converter
All the world’s currencies at your fingertips! XE not only provides live exchange rates and charts, you can also set an XE rate alert to monitor your currencies for immediate notification. Live rates are refreshed each minute for every world currency and precious metal. It’s necessary especially during times when currencies drop and appreciate often.

Photos: PhotoMix Ltd. via Pexels.com, icons from Google play store and Apple store
This article appeared on p34 of the beijingkids July 2018 Home & Relocation Guide.

Ask a Chinese guy on the street, “你知道多少汉字?” Nǐ zhīdào duōshǎo hànzì?  (How many Chinese characters do you know?) Chances are that person might say around 4,000 characters. That’s a lot!

When you’re accustomed to a language that uses the alphabet (in any forms) as a writing system, memorizing and pronouncing words can be simple. Chinese is a logographic language (in which a character means a word or a phrase), and it is helpful to have a pictographic or visual memory to remember words.

We know that writing Chinese characters is not as easy as it seems. Despite the fact that most phones and computers enable us to write Chinese characters by inputting pinyin, learning the correct character stroke order (笔顺 bǐshùn) is essential if you want to improve your fluency in Chinese. It is understandable, however, if your teacher spares you the added challenge of the stroke order when you first begin since there’s a lot of things to juggle when learning Chinese.

The rules when writing characters (with examples) are as follows:

1.    Write from top to bottom, and left to right (三)
2.    Horizontal before vertical (一 in 十)
3.    Character-spanning strokes last (丨in 聿)
4.    Diagonals right-to-left before diagonals left-to-right (丿in 文)
5.    Center before outside in vertically symmetrical characters (亅 in 水)
6.    Enclosures before contents (put people inside first, then close the door) (口 in 回)
7.    Left vertical stroke before enclosing stroke (丨in 口)
8.    Bottom enclosures last (辶 in 道)
9.    Dots and minor strokes last (丶 in 玉)

These rules aren’t as complicated as they seem and actually do make a lot of sense when put into practice. The majority of us are right-handed and writing from top to bottom and left to right would have made sense back in the olden days in order to avoid smudging the ink.

But we’re not using ink but WeChat and Pleco!
Yes, WeChat, computer software, translators, and apps like Pleco let us “write” Chinese characters in a swift. But imagine you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere in China and have no mobile connection — but you have Pleco where you can “draw” a character. It can help you read words and if you know stroke orders, you can write characters quickly and have Pleco precisely recognize and search their meaning.

Aside from Pleco, there’s another app to use when learning stroke order: Chinese Stroke Order (app icon on the left; free download on iOS).

Once you input Chinese words/pinyin (in this case, my name 安迪 Āndí ), the app will teach you the correct stroke order for each character.

And while you memorize the stroke order, the app also provides you the meaning of the character.

Ok so the character I wrote looked similar to the one above, right?

It also has a translate function where you can select a translate engine… and in this case, I’m using Google China.

Do I really need to learn correct stroke orders?
Yes, of course. Stroke orders are an integral part of the Chinese language. The number of strokes is used to classify Chinese characters in dictionaries. Standardizing the stroke order means an increase in accuracy and readability; even with messy handwriting, people can usually decipher the meaning. On the other hand, learning stroke order will allow you to emulate calligraphy masters and ensure the characters you write are well balanced and more beautiful – maybe.

On the flip side, learning stroke orders may seem like a waste of time when you have so many other things to worry about, or if the character is simple and has few strokes. If you are a Chinese language student, the thought of tediously going over and learning each stroke of each character seems time-consuming and meaningless when you might have to cram hundreds of characters a week for every dictation (听写 tīngxiě).

However, learning the stroke order helps you to understand the character intimately, and you’ll notice that you start to take notice of certain elements of the character that you may not have done otherwise, as well as appreciate the radicals, which often indicate a character’s vague meaning. The 214 radicals not only act as building blocks but also as signposts pointing towards the meaning and pronunciation of the character. More importantly, learning stroke order is like rote learning, it aids your memorization of the character as a whole.

You’ll also find that once you have perfected the stroke order, it is easier, neater, and faster to write characters in general. You’ll find that there’s an element of muscle memory involved – drilling the characters into your brain will help your hand find its way, often before your brain does. This comes in very handy if you hit a wall in exams.

And there you have it, all the reasons to learn stroke order and just one mediocre excuse not to: time. So, what are you waiting for? Time to start practicing!

Photos: Wikimedia, Cchar, Chinese Tools, Kids Britannica; screenshots by Andy Penafuerte.

This Mandarin Monday post is an expanded version of the article that first appeared on our sister site, the Beijinger, during its Mandarin Month.

See more stories by this author here.
Email: andypenafuerte@beijing-kids.com
Instagram: @coolkidandy

The smartphone has transformed expat life, giving us access to information and services wherever we go. Here are a few of the most useful apps to help you survive and thrive in Beijing.

WeChat

Forget Facebook, Twitter, and Whatsapp – in China, WeChat is king. Beijingers use it for networking, sharing and gossip, and even pay their bills on it. Get used to the idea of scanning QR codes instead of exchanging phone numbers. It also has WeChat Wallet (click here for a set-up guide), a portable payment system where you can top up your phone, pay utility bills, order a taxi, or book a table for dinner.

Alipay

WeChat may dominate social media, but when it comes to website payments, the competition is Alipay. It’s more than just a Paypal equivalent — you’ll see more locals paying for their shopping and dining with their smartphones than with cards. Go to pg 43 for details on how to set up Alipay.

Pleco

Whether you’re serious about learning Mandarin or just want to get by, Pleco is an outstanding language app for Chinese. The basic package is free, but you can buy and download other added functions. Particularly useful is its feature to read characters with your phone’s camera. Pleco even indicates the tones for characters, with a crafty color coding system.

Baidu Translate

Need to translate short words or long paragraphs? Baidu Translate is a must have for that. Its handy camera function can help you decode daily things in a world full of Mandarin, from operating your washing machine to replying to messages sent by your Chinese contacts.

Air Matters

Brace yourself for polluted days in Beijing. If you want to know how dirty the air you breathe is, Air Matters is the harbinger of bad news. You can opt to put the current air quality index reading as an app notification.

Apple Maps

From simple searches to transport options, Apple Maps is a viable tool to help you survive daily commuting and traveling in the city. Just don’t forget to close the app after using it, or else your mobile data might be drained by the app’s real-time use of Global Positioning System (GPS) location services

MetroMan Beijing

This handy subway app includes a search function and will tell you which stations are close to you, as well as a map of the whole subway system. It also gives users estimates about travel time and distance, number of transfers, and prices.

Three apps we wish were in English

Baidu Maps

Even if Google Maps can bypass the Great Firewall, it just isn’t accurate in Beijing. GPS location is “offset,” meaning that it’s out often by hundreds of yards. Baidu Maps is an up-to-date counterpart of Apple Maps, and offers 3D searching, traffic information, street view, and more – as long as you can read Chinese.

Taobao

Taobao, its upmarket sister site Tmall and wholesaler Alibaba are at the heart of the Chinese obsession with e-commerce (though newcomer JD.com is taking them on in the cities at least.) But while the Taobao app is less intimidatingly busy and complex than the website, it’s still for the fluent and/or determined only.

Didi

Just a year ago, we had Uber cars circulating the city. But after a mega merger between Uber and Didi, the car-hailing game in Beijing has changed, making taxi hailing a much more difficult way of traveling compared to just riding a bus or taking the subway.

This  article originally appeared on p 32-33 of beijingkids May 2017 Home & Relocation Guide.
Download the digital copy here.