How to help with homework when you can't read the language

Across India there are millions of homes where the child studies in English and the parents do not read it. The parents want to help. They simply cannot open the book and know what it says. Most advice for these families is useless, because it assumes the parent can read the question.

Here is a method that does not assume that.

Step 1: Get the question out of the book

You do not have to read it — you only have to capture it. Photograph the question with your phone. Hold the phone flat above the page, make sure the light is not behind you, and check that the whole question fits in the frame.

Step 2: Get it explained in your language

This is the part that has only recently become possible. Trickly reads the photograph, works out the answer, and writes the whole explanation in the language you choose — Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati or English.

If reading is difficult for you too, press the read-aloud button and listen instead. If typing is difficult, press the microphone and just say the problem out loud.

Step 3: Do not give your child the answer

This is where most parents go wrong, with the best intentions. If you read out the answer, your child learns nothing and will be stuck again tomorrow.

Switch to parent mode instead. You get the same explanation rewritten as a teaching script — the actual sentences to say, in the simplest words, with no technical terms. Read the first sentence. Stop. Ask your child what they think comes next.

You are not trying to be their teacher. You are trying to be the person in the room who does not give up on the question.

Step 4: Make them do one more, alone

Once your child says they understand, give them a similar question and walk away. Understanding while someone explains is not the same as understanding. The second question, done alone, is the one that proves it.

Every Trickly lesson ends with practice questions for exactly this reason.

What this changes

Not your child's marks, at least not immediately. What changes first is the shape of the evening. Homework stops being the moment when everyone finds out what the parent does not know, and becomes something the two of you work out together.

That is worth more than the answer to any one question.