Wenlin Software for Learning Chinese () is a software application designed by Tom Bishop, who is also president of the Wenlin Institute. It is based on his experience of the needs of learners of the

Chinese language Chinese ( or ) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and List of ethnic groups in China, many minority ethnic groups in China, as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora. Approximately 1.39& ...

, predominantly Mandarin. It contains a dictionary function, a corpus of Chinese texts, a function for reading and creating Chinese text files, and a flashcard function. By pointing the cursor at a Chinese character the software looks up an English word, and vice versa, working like a dictionary. The software recognizes files in

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

, GB 2312, Big5, and HZ format.

Functions

Dictionary function

The dictionary contains an electronic version of the ABC Chinese–English Dictionary by John DeFrancis and the

Shuowen Jiezi The ''Shuowen Jiezi'' is a Chinese dictionary compiled by Xu Shen , during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). While prefigured by earlier reference works for Chinese characters like the ''Erya'' (), the ''Shuowen Jiezi'' contains the ...

seal character dictionary. The current version (4.3.2) contains more than 300,000 Chinese-English entries and over 60,000 English-Chinese entries. It allows users to search for Chinese characters or words by inputting either Chinese characters or pinyin using a variety of input options, including handwriting recognition. Users can update existing entries and add new entries to the dictionary. The program can also be extended with additional data modules, such as the ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Unlike most electronic Chinese dictionaries, characters in Wenlin are defined in terms of the Character Description Language (CDL), an XML specification for describing complex glyphs in East Asian language, developed by the Wenlin Institute. This allows the program to define characters and character variants that are not defined in existing character sets such as

. Version 4.3.2 of Wenlin covers more than 80,000 Chinese characters, including many rare characters.

List function

The software allows the user to display lists of Chinese characters ordered by

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...

, stroke count, frequency, components, or Unicode. It also displays lists of words by pinyin, frequency, and serial number. English words can be displayed alphabetically, as well as the 214 radicals of the Chinese language.

Corpus and text function

The paid version of the software comes with a small corpus of largely Classical Chinese texts. The software also allows users to open text files in a variety of Chinese character encodings.

Development and versioning

Wenlin Software for Learning Chinese is developed and sold by the Wenlin Institute, a Social Purpose Corporation for Chinese and English language education, with Tom Bishop as President. The current paid version of the software, called the DELUXE Edition (), is 4.3.2. Wenlin Institute also offers a free 4.2.1 version, called the Free Edition ().

References

External links

Official website

Discussions of Wenlin

Pinyin News entry for Wenlin 4.0SinoSplice review of Wenlin 4Screencast: Wenlin helps you read Chinese
review of Wenlin 3.3.6 by Stian Håklev

CALICO Journal, Volume 21 Number 2, pp. 441–448

by Cecilia P. Y. Chu ( UC Berkeley)
CALL for Chinese: Issues and Practice
article (2002 '' JCLTA'' 37.2:1-58) by Zheng-sheng Zhang (

San Diego State University San Diego State University (SDSU) is a Public university, public research university in San Diego, California, United States. Founded in 1897, it is the third-oldest university and southernmost in the 23-member California State University (CS ...

), comparison of 10 programs including Wenlin 1.0 {{DEFAULTSORT:Wenlin Software For Learning Chinese Language learning software Chinese-language education