I had chinese education when I was in primary school. I can speak and understand spoken mandarin but writing mandarin characters is a particular skill I kind of lost it.
Thank goodness to mandarin keyboards apps on smartphones I'm able to use pinyin to input mandarin characters.
Recently my relative in China asked about Malaysia bird nest, the question was simple but to answer it required some level of complexity for me. I needed to look at sentence structure, grammar and context, it would be a real uphill task for me just to type out the response.
I pulled out Google Translate and tested translating full sentences and I was quite surprised with the accuracy in translating the sentence from English. So from now on I'm using Google translate to write in mandarin, just type in the sentence in English then it will translate to Mandarin, from there just copy and paste to chatbox.
