Customer Reviews

Wenlin 3.0

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the Best Chinese-English Software out there. Move your mouse over a character to get possible translations, including coloquialisms. Type in the pin-yin to get matching characters. Studying Chinese becomes quick and painless. I bought this for my husband for his Chinese class he's taking, and it shaved about two hours of his homework time to not have to search through the dictionary by hand to find characters. Well worth every penny.

The claims made for language software are often overblown and result in disappointment for the purchaser. This product is different. It does exactly what it claims. Of all the many books and programs I have bought for learning Mandarin, this is undoubtedly the one that I use every single day.
If you come across an unfamiliar character on a page, draw it with your mouse or brush and Wenlin will bring up an entry which provides the definition, the origins of the character, an animation that gives the correct stroke order for writing the character, a full list of all the words that contain the character (from its Chinese-English dictionary of 200,000 entries), all other characters that use as a component the one you have selected, cross references to the Hanyu Da Zidian, Grammata Serica Recensa, Karlgren's "Analytic Dictionary", etc. The latest version will even take you to the Unicode website page for the character.
If drawing the unfamiliar character doesn't work, there are many other ways of finding the character you are looking for. You can type in the pinyin, if you know the pronunciation, for a full list of homophones. You can find a character by drawing one of its components. And, best of all, you can copy and paste electronic text directly into Wenlin.
Do you want to convert full form character text into simplified, or vice versa? Wenlin will do it for you. Do you want to export the documents you have created into Word, Powerpoint, etc? You can.
Free updates are available online for Version 3 onwards (Version 2, which employed a smaller dictionary cannot be upgraded, so avoid it).
I feel so enthusiatic about this product that it has made me write my first ever review of anything.
As a previous reviewer said: "Worth every penny".

I am a late adopter of Wenlin, I started to use it only almost two years into my studies, preferring traditional dictionaries. For the memorization of characters I'd suggest starting students stick to printed dictionaries for some time before they start using software like Wenlin.

The user interface of Wenlin is cheap, almost retro: it has an opening and ending jingle and seems designed for functionality more than anything. It is, however, very easy to use in terms of looking up single words and characters: it offers a host of ways to do this according to what you need.

Generally speaking, Wenlin stops being useful when you move into computer and technical terms. In businesses such as accounting or steel-working you will have to stick to traditional dictionaries or your gut feeling. For literature and articles, it is very, very good. You can copy/paste entire articles and then mouse-look all the words until you know the meaning of the article. This is a double-edged sword, as several as my co-students have found out: come exam-time, with no Wenlin and only a printed dictionary, you will quickly be lost. Don't get too dependent on it.

An excellent purchase but still some room for improvement in terms of providing technical and computing terms. Worth the money.

Make sure and get the latest version. Wenlin Software for Learning Chinese Version 4 was released earlier this year. Wenlin is one of the best software programs for learners of Chinese. I've used it since version 3.0 and prefer it over all other Chinese learning software.