Wenlin Software for Learning Chinese () is a

software application Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

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 (, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the ...

, 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, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

GB 2312 is a key official character set of the People's Republic of China, used for Simplified Chinese characters. GB2312 is the registered internet name for EUC-CN, which is its usual encoded form. ''GB'' refers to the Guobiao standards (国家标准 ...

Big5 Big-5 or Big5 is a Chinese character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for traditional Chinese characters. The People's Republic of China (PRC), which uses simplified Chinese characters, uses the GB 18030 character set inst ...

, and HZ format.

Functions

Dictionary function

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

John DeFrancis John DeFrancis (August 31, 1911January 2, 2009) was an American linguist, sinologist, author of Chinese language textbooks, lexicographer of Chinese dictionaries, and Professor Emeritus of Chinese Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. ...

and the

Shuowen Jiezi ''Shuowen Jiezi'' () is an ancient Chinese dictionary from the Han dynasty. Although not the first comprehensive Chinese character dictionary (the ''Erya'' predates it), it was the first to analyze the structure of the characters and to give t ...

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 (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese, Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally writte ...

, 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 websiteWenlin Press Releases

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 The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

)
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 research university in San Diego, California. Founded in 1897 as San Diego Normal School, it is the third-oldest university and southernmost in the 23-member California State University (CSU) system ...

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