Wenlin

Lots of tools outthere to help you in your Chinese studies, most of them are free. Of all the tools I’ve used so far in my Chinese studies, there’s one that really stands out – Wenlin.

True, it is a very expensive piece of software (free demo here), but… here’s a list of reasons why Wenlin is the best thing that could happen to your Chinese reading/writing studies (by no particular order) :

• It’s the most comprehensive dictionary I’ve seen. I’ve yet to see Wenlin fail by not recognizing a word or a word combination, even for slang I didn’t find in paper dictionaries.
• For every character, Wenlin shows where the character comes from.
• There are endless ways of looking up a character you don’t know. The methods I use the most are – “Radicals by stroke count” and by recognizing components and using the “List characters containing X as a component” or “list words containing X”.
• For every Pinyin pronunciation, Wenlin will say the word for you in either a male or a female voice. After all, Pinyin isn’t all that intuitive for the English speakers. The square on the left toolbar will allow you to press on a character and hear it out.
• Flash-card memory games to memorize your characters (File->Flashcards).
• Wenlin shows the character strokes and is able to recognize writing with the mouse or touch-pad through the Brush option.
• Allows very easy pinyin word processing.
• Wenlin will transform characters into pinyin, transform Traditional to Simplified etc. (Edit->Make transformed copy).
• And probably a dozen other features I just take for granted…