Wenlin is CD-ROM software for the Macintosh, MS-Windows, and DOS operating systems. Wenlin tackles the most frustrating obstacles for students, scholars, and speakers of Chinese with its versatile and easy-to-use interface. It is like having a seasoned scholar on your desktop! An integrated solution, Wenlin combines a high-speed expandable Chinese dictionary, a full-featured text editor, and unique "flashcard" system all in one intuitive environment.
 

It is a comprehensive tool for beginning students, life-long speakers, and scholars alike. Wenlin includes the huge ABC Chinese-English Dictionary edited by John DeFrancis.  Other improvements include the new toolbar, MS-Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP support, Cut and Paste between applications, easier typing for pinyin, Apple CLK support, and more.

• New Dictionary contains almost 200,000 entries

• Look Up by Radical

• New Font Support

• Standard Windows/Mac interface

• Improved Stroke control

• Document Format and Printing improvements

• Flexible handwriting recognition

• Dictionary switching

• Unicode 3.1

• OS X Native for Mac

Wenlin's unique interface provides instant "point to" vocabulary look-up and "click" access to detailed vocabulary information. Wenlin's extensive character descriptions and cross-referencing include pictures of characters in ancient and modern forms, simple and full form, and pinyin.
 

Wenlin reads, writes, edits, and prints Chinese documents of any size and includes built-in selection of Chinese literature and current media. Unicode, GB, Big5, UTF-8 and HZ Encoding are supported. Automated drill and review includes scoring, tracking, interactive testing, multiple-choice and composed-answer. Other powerful features include animated stroke-by-stroke display, handwriting recognition, and audio-CD quality studio recordings of all Mandarin syllables. Multi-user packs are available.

We've added a bigger and better Chinese-English dictionary with close to 200,000 entries (nearly three times as many as in version 2), and many other improvements to the definitions, such as measure words for nouns. The famous sinologist John DeFrancis is the editor of this greatly revised and expanded edition of his original ABC Dictionary.
 

Wenlin's "instant look-up" gives you the ability to look up any word or character in any Chinese electronic text simply by pointing to it. You can look up words and characters by pronunciation (pinyin), by handwriting recognition, by stroke count, and by components (or radicals).

You can modify dictionary entries and add new ones. NEW commands in the List menu enable looking up characters using the traditional 214 radicals, which you can see listed either in their traditional order or in a new order that takes into account variant and simplified forms and modern classifications of stroke types and stroke counts. Under each radical you can see its list of characters, ordered by residual stroke count. 
 

Click on a character or select a compound word for detailed vocabulary information. Extensively cross-referenced character descriptions include pictures of ancient, modern, simple and full form characters. Each character entry is linked to listings of all the compound words that contain the character, including definitions, ordered by frequency of usage. Lists of characters by stroke-count and by pronunciation, and groups of characters that share components, are also instantly accessible.

Powerful Text Editor
 

• Reads, writes, edits, and prints Chinese documents

• Supports Unicode format, the most widely recognized world standard, as well as GB, Big5, UTF-8 and HZ

• Built-in selection of Chinese literature, current new media included

• Word-wrap, undo, cut, copy, paste, search, and replace

• Unlimited document size

• Characters and words entered using phonetic conversion or handwriting recognition

• Instant dictionary integrated with text editor

• Combines simple and full form Chinese characters, pinyin, and English in one document

• Compatible with other Chinese language applications, pen/tablet tools

• NEW Printing feature: Now you can specify the sizes of the margins (left/right/top/bottom), in either inches or centimeters, optionally have page breaks shown on the screen, and optionally have page numbers printed at the bottom of each page. These features use new Page Setup and Paginate commands in the File menu.
  

The built-in Chinese font is in the classical Song dynasty style and is scalable to look good even on high-resolution printers. The "Size" menu now gives much higher magnifications. Support is also provided for external Unicode TrueType fonts, for Chinese, English, and Pinyin.

Characters can be entered using pinyin or handwriting recognition. Simple and full form Chinese characters, pinyin, and English can even be combined in one document. NEW Handwriting recognition box: new options let you customize its behavior.  You can move its window anywhere on the screen, re-size it, and make it stay open until you close it. You can make it ignore stroke-order, and make it give you a choice between all the characters that are most similar to the one you have written.

Wenlin's "flashcards" provide automated drill and review, with multiple-choice and composed-answer testing phases. The dictionary is always accessible while using flashcards to memorize characters. In fact, Wenlin supports simultaneous display of documents, dictionary entries, lists, and flashcards to further enhance study. 

The "mouth" tool 

lets you hear a high-quality studio recording of the Mandarin pronunciation of any character, in a man and a woman's voice.  NEW Dictionary switching: to support users of version 2 who have customized their copies of the dictionary, Wenlin 3 lets you switch back and forth easily between two or more dictionaries. It also enables extracting modified entries from one dictionary and importing them into another, so you can obtain all the benefits of the new version without losing any improvements you have made to the dictionary in the old version. 

NEW Unicode 3.1

In addition to the twenty thousand Chinese characters in the original Unicode character set, the latest version of the international standard has codes for nearly fifty thousand more Chinese characters.

NEW Macintosh Support

Powerful "Flashcards" System
 

• Automated drill and review

• Interactive testing, multiple-choice and composed-answer

• Scoring and tracking

• Dictionary access while memorizing vocabulary

• Simultaneous display of documents, definitions, lists, and flashcards
  

Powerful Learning Tools

Use the "hand" tool for looking up vocabulary, the "I-beam" for selecting text, and the "grabber" for quickly copying text. The "brush" tool, for handwriting recognition, makes practicing and identifying characters much easier. The "stroking box" assists writing through animated stroke-by-stroke display of over 10,000 characters. NEW! Stroking box displays characters stroke-by-stroke in the beautiful Song dynasty style, appears in its own window with improved arrangement of controls, enables choosing foreground and background colors and even independently adjusting the horizontal and vertical thicknesses of strokes.

Illustrations of Wenlin Software for Learning Chinese
 

With Wenlin, by pointing at any Chinese word on the screen, you can see the definition in English. In this illustration, the student is pointing at the first character in the two-character Chinese phrase meaning 'once upon a time'.

If you were using Wenlin right now (instead of just looking at a picture of Wenlin), you could point to any of the Chinese words and see its English definition just as easily. This works with practically any Chinese text which you could find anywhere in electronic form (including Chinese texts which you can download from the Internet).

By clicking on a word (rather than just pointing to it), you can easily access more detailed information.

Wenlin's electronic dictionary includes pictures of ancient and modern forms of Chinese characters, along with explanations, to help you understand and remember the shapes of Chinese characters.

Here we see that the Chinese character for 'day' is also the character for 'heaven' and 'sky', and it originally depicted a human figure.

By clicking on the pronunciation (which is tian, pronounced in the high level tone), you could hear recordings of the pronunciation (in both male and female voices) (Wenlin includes recordings of all the Mandarin syllables).

Below the explanation, two "triangle buttons" are visible. By clicking on the triangle labeled "stroke... (4 strokes)" you could see how to write the character stroke-by-stroke. (Wenlin can display over ten thousand different characters, using their conventional stroke orders.)

Another triangle button gives you the option of viewing a list of all the Chinese characters which contain the 'heaven' character as a component. This kind of list can help you learn the differences between similar looking characters.

Other interesting and useful features are available by scrolling down and clicking on more triangle buttons.

By clicking on the button for listing all the words and phrases containing a character, you can see a list like this one for the 'day' character:

The entire list has 490 items in it (in version 1.0 it had 67 -- how's that for an improvement?); only the first few are shown here. The list is ordered by frequency of usage, with the most common vocabulary at the top. Notice the words for 'today' and 'tomorrow'. An ordinary dictionary would not list these words under the character for 'day', because 'day' is not the first character in the word. (If you prefer, you can also list words and phrases starting with a character, in alphabetical order, like an ordinary dictionary.) But Wenlin lists mingtian 'tomorrow' under both the characters ming and tian. If you wanted to know more about the first character, ming, you could simply click on it (--if you were actually using Wenlin, instead of just looking at an illustration on the Web).

Suppose you'd like to see some examples of how the word for 'tomorrow' is used. You could invoke Wenlin's Search Files feature to search through a huge collection of Chinese literature for examples.

This is what you would see if you used Search Files to find examples of mingtian 'tomorrow' in a collection of stories and essays by the famous 20th-century author Lu Xun, if you suspended the search after four occurrences had been found. (You can suspend a search at any time, and then resume it at any time.) The window displays the name of each file, the position of the occurrence, and the line that contains the occurrence. To open one of the files and see the full context of an occurrence, you could click on the triangle button next to the file name.

We intend to support other operating systems, such as GNU/Linux and BSD, eventually. We formerly supported DOS, but not any more.

Wenlin is compatible with Chinese versions of MacOS and MS-Windows, and with the Apple Chinese Language Kit, but does not require any of these.