hi. anybody out there have first hand acquaintance with wenlin? wenlin, as i hear tell, is a fabulous system for improving chinese? has anyone here used wenlin?
I have Wenlin for Macintosh. I use it for very basic translation, and I’m sure I’m not using it to its full capability. However, it gives good background on the characters, has good cross-references and can remember favourites.
If you have a Mac, PM me.
Wenlin is great imagine it as a dictionary that you can add to, you can search by radical and/or component which can be very handy for some characrters. I’d highly recommend it for the serious user or student of Chinese. The only problem is that it is expensive and a casual user may not be able to justify the cost. I also found the flashcard program wanting.
CYA,
Okami
Hello,
I’m the author of a cheaper alternative to learn chinese characters,
it’s called learn Chinese 2003 and you can find it here lchinese.com
Hope this helps
Regards,
Jerome
[quote=“jdangu”]Hello,
I’m the author of a cheaper alternative to learn Chinese characters,
it’s called learn Chinese 2003 and you can find it here lchinese.com
Hope this helps
Regards,
Jerome[/quote]
very nice, but can you make a Mac version? Please! 
I love Wenlin and use it often. Strongly recommended.
And although a few rough spots need to be worked out, there’s also no better hanzi to pinyin converter than Wenlin.
I’m sorry I don’t know anything about programming on the Mac 
Cranky laowai jsut introduce Wenlin to me.
I am currently playing around with the demo version and I think the program will be very useful. If your not sure why not downlload the demo to get a feel for it. If its what you want then purchase it.
Here we have the same folks reviewing two top softwares.
They like wenlin better, but it costs 4x as much.
calico.org/CALICO_Review/review/clavis.htm
calico.org/CALICO_Review/review/wenlin.htm
This one’s new to me…
calico.org/CALICO_Review/review/chinesetutor.htm
I guess on the low end there is Dr. Eye and Babylon.
Wenlin has released version 3.4. So those of you with the program may want to install the free upgrade.
I find it has a really clunky interface - like something from the Windows 3.1 days. Another thing I don’t like is, say you enter a four-character term: it only (as far as I know) searches for the entire term, and doesn’t look for other terms starting with one or more of those characters. Dr. Eye does look up these partial terms.
But for sheer volume of terminology, Wenlin can’t be beat. I use it all the time, and I’m constantly adding vocab I find in it into Dr. Eye - my primary translation tool.
The insane amount they charge for it isn’t justifiable in my opinion, however. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that it’s been pirated.
The GUI looks like crap. If I don’t see pretty things, I won’t use it.
Wenlin 4.0 has just been released. It features much better handling of Pinyin conversions and lots of other improvements. (For example, flashcards now work with words as well as single Chinese characters.) I love this program and use it often.
The interface is a bit fancier but basically the same as before, which I regard as a good thing. YMMV.
A new copy costs US$179 for the download version. To upgrade from 3.x costs US$49. So if you already have 3.x and were thinking about ordering the new ABC English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary (included in Wenlin), you’d be well on your way to paying that.