What is Wenlin NOT good for? What are its limitations?
It is much more than just a dictionary, but less than a complete course. We wouldn’t recommend trying to learn Chinese with Wenlin all by itself. Ideally one should take a class with a good teacher. If that’s not possible, one should at least have a good textbook with audio tapes. It is NOT an automatic translation device that would make it unnecessary for you to learn Chinese. The current version gives Mandarin pronuncation only, not Cantonese or other dialects. It is not designed for learning English; it assumes you know English and want to learn Chinese. In the current version, the English-Chinese dictionary isn’t nearly as good as the Chinese-English dictionary. Flashcards are currently limited to single characters, as opposed to words and phrases of more than one syllable. The same limitation applies to the sound recordings. Wenlin can’t read Chinese characters in a scanned image.
