Screencast: Wenlin helps you read Chinese

I had studied Chinese for about two and a half years when I finally discovered Wenlin – not a minute too soon. The program is hard to define to those who have not used it, it allows you to load in a Chinese text (by entry, copy+paste or loading a file) and just by moving your mouse over the characters, it displays the dictionary definitions both of the phrases, and of the individual characters. You can then drill down and look up character etymologies, lists of all characters with this component, all phrases containing this character, etc. The strength of the program is

• the amazing dictionary, based on the ABC dictionary by John DeFrancis at Hawaii University, which has almost every word you would want to look up. (My Chinese friend used this software when she was reading a hundred year old materials for her history class).
• And the ease of looking up. Any student of Chinese knows that trying to find a character whose pronunciation is unknown is a veritable endeavour – you have to identify its radical (and they change appearance) and count the number of lines, etc.

Thus Wenlin enables you to read texts “above” your level – for me reading newspaper articles would be frustrating because there were too many words that were important to the article, but that I would not run into often (like “apartheid”, “ambassador”, etc). Wenlin let’s you quickly lookup these almost without slowing down your reading. Thus you can advance from reading what your teacher prepared (John is a foreign student. He is in Beijing. Beijing is nice. John is American. Hi John.) to real material (A report of the 26th State Council of Copyright Protection).

As I stated above, trying to explain what Wenlin is and does is very hard, and so it is ideally suited to the new trend of doing screencasts – small movies – of software. I tried my hand at it, and here are some very short videos of Wenlin in action.

• Wenlin Demo in QuickTime (better quality)
• Wenlin Demo in avi format

(This was my first attempt, so it’s not perfect. I used a trial version of Snapz PRO, which worked wondrously, even on my old iBook. I wish there was better opensource software available for OSX, but that goes for almost any category, sadly.)

Stian

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006 at 4:55 am and is filed under china. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.