6 Chinese Study Tools
Wenlin is a customizable and expandable Chinese-English dictionary, searchable Chinese text editor, Chinese text converter, and language learning tool. The dictionary is based on the updated edition of the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary edited by John DeFrancis (University of Hawaii Press, 2003), with concise, high-quality definitions for more than 10,000 individual characters and nearly 200,000 words and phrases, written with the learner of Chinese in mind. When no definition is available from the ABC dictionary, Wenlin draws from the Unicode database, which contains more than 19,000 brief but often useful definitions for individual characters.
Supports instant lookup and other useful features like lookup by component, an animated stroke-order box, audible pronunciations, and handwriting input. The flashcards component supplies frequency data for the 3,000 most commonly used characters.
The Chinese-English dictionary contains around 250,000 entries and supports instant lookup. Among many other useful language-learning features, MacKEY 5 can display Hanyu Pinyin or various Cantonese transcriptions alongside Chinese character texts. Also includes a text-to-speech module.
Runs in Java. Clavis Sinica is a text reader designed for students of Chinese. It features an integrated set of dictionary windows that together supply information about the radical and phonetic elements of the character, compounds that contain the character, lexical information, and so on. The more than 25,000 words and phrases in the dictionary include the vocabulary used in most college-level textbooks for Chinese. The flashcards tool allows you to drill yourself on the pronunciation and meaning of words and characters from any text, or the 800 most commonly used characters. Handles both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, as well as Unicode.
Runs in Java. Free. DimSum is a CEDICT-based instant-lookup text reader. Also has the ability to add romanizations to Chinese plain-text files, RTF files, and HTML pages. Includes an array of miscellaneous tools: an abacus, flashcards, Chinese name generator, GIF creator, and various converters for currency, measures, numbers, romanizations, and encodings.
Runs in Java. Free, open-source. ZDT is a CEDICT-based flashcard application. Includes an instant-lookup web browser.
Free. Extends well beyond the variants listed in the Unihan database. This is a useful tool for anyone doing scholarly work on China, especially those working with old editions of texts.
