Wenlin? Any thoughts - reviews?

Hi billm, I use Wenlin all the time, and I love it.

Pleco dictionary is the best thing out there hands down. if you have a smart phone, you can have a huge mobile reference. wenlin is good, but can only be used on a computer. wenlin uses the ABC dictionary, which pleco has, as well as Adso, Oxford, and various others. http://www.pleco.com/

agreed with clay, and eargerly looking forward for Pleco v2. But on a 'computer', there's no match for Wenlin. I use it both on PC and Mac and couldn't do without, the rich set of functionality more than makes up for the awkard user-interface.

Everyone who has taken the plunge and paid for Wenlin raves about it. As mentioned earlier, a large part of its value is its use of the ABC Dictionary. There are also some extra features, beyond what freeware programs provide, but as a PlecoDict user I've never seen those few little extras as warranting the outlay of several hundred dollars. Ouch! If you have the money, you don't have PlecoDict, and you love the demo version when you try it, your mileage may vary. Call me a stinge. Wenlin has been mentioned oodles of times on the Forum, and there's always a lot of positive comments. I have so much good freeware that my purse groans every time I read those comments. :-) I'm waiting for PlecoDict to come out with a desktop version one day. Fingers crossed.

Auntie> On the other hand, you are the one with pleco that thinks that one should avoid to try to read Chinese texts because of the dictionary work. I have certainly successfully attempted texts with Wenlin that I would not have been able to get through without. Goulniky> I agree, if you don't mind reading texts from the computer screen, wenlin is really good. billm> The ABC dictionary is quite good, but I understand that it is not unique for Wenlin. If you want to learn the characters you read, the extra features like analysis of characters and stroke order are very valuable. The interface is quaint, but once you get used to it, it is very fast (important!) and convenient. Things that could be better is that there are not so many example sentences, and that the English-Chinese dictionary is quite weak.

Another point that could be better - you cannot use wenlin directly for viewing a net page (like chinesePera-kun). You have to copy and paste the text you want to study into wenlin.

I keep forgetting important points.. When you are learning new characters, it is very useful that the 3000 most common characters are numbered, so that you can see if an unknown character is common or not. They also have some information on frequency of combinations, but that seems less complete and less useful. Of course different lists do not completely agree on the relative frequency of characters, and one should not place too much importance on it. But it is useful to know if a character is among the first 1000, in the 2500-3000 range or not even on the list.

Fantastic. Thanks for the input. You've all answered my question.

Not quite what I said about dictionary work. There is value to going through an impenetrable text with pera-kun or DimSum or an equivalent expensive tool like Wenlin, picking out the meaning character by character. However that activity is definitely NOT "reading" and I think the value of real reading is too often overlooked in the presence of these tools. You should be able to do real reading with or without these tools, but that doesn't mean the tools have no other uses.