Asian Mama Journal

Our family has been using this YouDao Dictionary Pen 3 for the past few weeks and I am writing this post to share our experience. Our experience with the pen so far though? It has been great for our family language-learning dynamic! I will explain a little bit more on that later in this post.

What does the YouDao Dictionary Pen 3 do?

First, let’s talk about what this pen does (I made a quick video on how our family uses the pen at my instagram).

Basically, the main function of the pen is to scan and interpret words in both Chinese and English. All you have to do is to scan the text using the scanning window with the first letter and lift on the last one. You need to make sure that you keep the scanning window pressed while scanning horizontally. The pen in general has a high translation accuracy and supports automatic multiline scanning. The scanned contents can be translated as complete sentences within 2-3 seconds as you life the pen. I also learnt that the dictionary pen supports English phonics learning. But since we are using the pen mainly for Chinese learning, this function will be more useful for readers who want to focus on English pronunciation.

The pen also provides a “tap and check” function where you can specifically look into target words or phrases that you are not familiar with. The screen would show the strokes, pronunciation and meaning of the vocabulary scanned. This function really comes in handy for our family as we like to identify characters while reading long texts. This makes reading a bit less overwhelming as we divide up our Chinese learning in chunks.

The pen also have this wordbook function where it tracks the vocabularies that we have been looking up. This greatly improves our efficiency in learning vocabularies as we get to review the words that we have been learning!

I have never used any previous versions of YouDao dictionary pens. However, from what I have heard, the Youdao 3.0 provides smoother reading with a more natural human voice. It also has a slightly larger color screen with a child lock function (even though we do not need that function yet for our toddler). Some additional new features of the YouDao Dictionary Pen 3 include:

• High resolution large screen on a 2.97-inch touch screen
• 2.5D Glass Screen
• Metal Shell Design
• Large speaker with high volume and crystal-clear sound
• Various choice of colors
• Can be synced with the Youdao Dictionary app

What we like about the YouDao Dictionary Pen 3?

Our favorite features of the dictionary pen though boils down to the following few things and it has a lot to do with our individual family member’s needs :

• The pen’s ability to explain characters individually – this “tap and check” function is really amazing for us. As a Cantonese speaker, I am very comfortable with reading Chinese characters. I am not however, a native Mandarin speaker. It therefore gets tricky when I time comes for me to read aloud in Mandarin to my son. Instead of using a phone to look up words, scanning the words directly using the dictionary pen helps save time and lower my overall phone screen time. My husband on the other hand, really enjoys this function because he feels a lot more independent in his Chinese reading time with our son. My husband is a Mandarin speaker but is not entirely comfortable with reading Chinese characters. Having the pen around him makes him feel a lot more capable and comfortable in reading books to our son in Mandarin.
• The wordbook function – the ability to review characters that we have learnt or looked into previously is a huge win for our family’s Chinese learning journey. Repetition really helps retain our memory of the characters and we often pull up the vocabularies we have learnt previously to see if we really have got them down.
• The use of the pen is not restricted to any certain book publications – there are a lot of pens out there that can only read texts on selected materials or publications. For our family, we try to read anything we come across with. We like to spend time reading the maps and pamphlets that we come across when we are visiting museums or exploring new places. This pen is therefore perfect for us as we can learn characters whenever and wherever we want. We don’t feel restricted in the use of our pen.
• The pen that we got is an international version which is perfect as there is also English instructions and operating interface

Is YouDao Dictionary Pen 3.0 suitable for my family?

Each family’s needs are different. Your purchase decision will really depend on your family’s language learning goals and situation. For us, the YouDao Dictionary Pen fulfills the particular needs of each family member. I get to improve and consolidate my Mandarin pronunciation skills, and my husband gets to be more independent in his Chinese reading time. A lot of our books at home also have no pinyin available so we use this pen daily as a family.

There are several other reviews that shared different experiences with the pen because of their different circumstances that I will link below here:

• Spots of Sunshine‘s review: Sunny is a fluent Chinese speaker and teaches her daughter in Traditional Chinese
• Chalk Academy: Betty is a Korean-Chinese mom who actively learns Chinese with her children
• Trilingual Texpats: Aime is a Taiwanese-American mother who teaches in Traditional Chinese
• Bilingual Kidspot: Chontelle is not a Chinese speaker and her kids are trilingual