# Screencast: Wenlin helps you read Chinese


![](http://wenlin.com/wenlin.gif)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
  [](http://www.chinesestudies.hawaii.edu/abc/%3Cbr) 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)](http://reganmian.net/blog/files/WenlinDemo.mov)
-   [Wenlin Demo in avi
  format](http://reganmian.net/blog/files/WenlinDemo.avi)

(This was my first attempt, so it’s not perfect. I used a trial version
of [](http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox)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