It's easy to get lost in translation apps

After nearly two years in Beijing, I've come to the conclusion that my efforts to learn Chinese have stalled.

I came to this realization a couple of weeks ago, when my young nephew in Scotland who was keen to get in touch to "practice his Chinese". While I was, of course, happy to talk to him, I hadn't realized that primary school kids in the United Kingdom had started to learn Chinese as a foreign language at such a young age and that kids these days were so au fait with such technology.

But more than this, the situation also presented me with something of a quandary: What if he knew more Chinese than me? Given the slow progress I had made in the previous year or so, this was looking like a very real possibility.