Dictionaries
Wenlin contains three dictionaries: English-Chinese, Chinese-English, and one specific to individual characters. The English-Chinese dictionary is mediocre, containing about 20,000 terms. It is OK for basic vocabulary, but one would not buy Wenlin for this dictionary.
The Chinese-English dictionary, though, is one of the key features of Wenlin. It is the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary by John DeFrancis, and contains about 200,000 words and phrases. I am amazed when I browse through the dictionary at all of the obscure words and phrases it contains. There are also a number of sample sentences associated with vocabulary which help in learning usage. Another nice feature is that noun entries include the appropriate measure words.
The character dictionary is also very impressive. It has about 10,000 characters. Each entry provides a definition if available, historic forms, stroke order in both static and moving form, and lists of characters and words using that character. It also lists the components of the character and often includes an explanation of how the components were chosen to form the character.
Conversion
Wenlin provides a number of ways to convert Chinese. You can convert full form characters to simple ones, and vice-versa. You can replace tone marks with numbers and back again. You can convert characters to pinyin. I have used the character conversion to write a letter in simple form characters, and then transform them into full form so that I could send the letter to someone who was used to the traditional characters. I have also practiced reading pinyin (I've been slow to learn the characters) by copying simple form characters from the VOA web page to Wenlin then converting them to Pinyin. The only problem is that sometimes Wenlin crashes after doing this conversion. It has otherwise been very handy, though.
Stroke order
As mentioned above, each character entry includes a display of the stroke order. What is really nice, though, is that you can see the characters being written, and can walk through the strokes forward and backward.
Flashcards
Wenlin includes a flashcard feature for learning characters. I haven't used this much, but it provides several types of drills to reinforce learning.
Other features
- Wenlin supports handwriting recognition for Chinese characters. You can use this to look up a character or to test yourself to see if you can write the character correctly. Wenlin won't show the character unless it is entered with the correct stroke order or you disable stroke order checking.
- Wenlin supports both simplified and traditional characters. You can select which one you prefer to view, and if a character shows up in a dictionary entry that has a different form in the other character set it will be listed.
- If you wave the pointer over a word of either language the dictionary entry for it will appear at the bottom of the screen. This makes lookups very easy.
- You can hear the pronunciation of any character in either a man or woman's voice. This feature isn't as useful as it could be because the characters are pronounced much more slowly than the would be in even slow regular speech.
- Wenlin functions as a text editor. It makes no claims to be a word processor, but it provides the same king of editing you could do with a simple editor like notepad.
- You can open up Chinese documents for reading. Wenlin comes with a number of public domain ancient and modern texts for practice.
- Lots of other features that would take up too much space to list.
Gripes
While Wenlin is an excellent program, there are a few areas of improvement that would be beneficial:
- When closing a window with user-entered text there is always a prompt asking whether you want to save the file. There are a lot of ways to use Wenlin without it being a text editor, and these prompts get annoying. A configuration option to disable these prompts would be nice.
- The English dictionary covers only basic vocabulary. There is a workaround, though, that works pretty well. You can bring up the entire ABC Chinese-English dictionary in a window, and then search for the English words there. You can even use regular expressions when searching, which makes it easier to find special usage.
- Wenlin often crashes in Windows 2000 and Windows XP when converting text from character form to pinyin. This is a long-running problem with versions 3.0 and 3.1.
- A number of the sample sentences have typos, mainly incorrect tone marks.
A Note on the ABC Dictionary
The ABC Dictionary included with Wenlin is also available in paper form. It is called the "ABC" dictionary because the Chinese-English entries appear in alphabetical rather than character order. DeFrancis believes the character system is a bad hack and a failure (see The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy) and feels that the language should be represented by an alphabet. His dictionary is consistent with that belief. I have to say that as a student of Chinese I don't always know the characters so it is a lot easier looking up the words by their Pinyin representation.
Title Clarification
The full name of the programs is "Wenlin: Software for Learning Chinese". While it is very useful as a reference tool, one should not mistake it for an instructional program. You will still need books, teachers or other educational software to learn Chinese. Wenlin will complement whichever of these you use very well, though.
Conclusion
With only a few minuses and a wealth of features, Wenlin is definitely worth getting. The list price is $249, but is available for $199 from several retailers. Updates have been free except for major upgrades such as from version 2 to 3.
