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1373 Review
54 Karma

Review on πŸ–‹οΈ Enhanced Penpower Chinese Expert with Pen Scanner Feature by Todd Phillips

Revainrating 5 out of 5

A very useful tool for learning Chinese language

I love the Penpower Chinese Expert. I have been taking Chinese conversation classes but am currently more interested in expanding my vocabulary to improve my reading skills. To that end, I recently received a publication on the 5,000 most commonly used words in Chinese, accompanied by 5,000 example sentences that illustrate their use. I scanned sentences on my computer with Penpower Chinese Expert. So far I've scanned about 3,000 sentences and learned a lot of vocabulary in that time. It seems to me that words are remembered better when I see and hear them used in real sentences. Penpower Chinese Expert can be a bit quirky. Sometimes it scans a different character than what's on the page. Sometimes he assigns the character a different pinyin pronunciation or applies the wrong tone. You have to keep that in mind. The program has built-in various editing features to help you make corrections. You can scan Chinese text directly into Penpower, but I've found that it works best if you first scan it into a Microsoft Word document and make your corrections there. , copy and paste them into Penpower. The voice that reads you sentences is rather wooden and mechanical, but you get used to it after a while. You can speed it up or slow it down. You can convert Penpower files into WMA files that you can play on your MP3 player. Interestingly, when you slow down Penpower's voice, the resulting WMA files speak more slowly. If Penpower is set to speak faster, the resulting WMA files will also speak faster. I have found that I prefer to listen to my sentences on my computer than on my MP3 player. First, the computer highlights individual words as they're spoken, making them easier to follow. Also, you can add your own notes right below the suggestions. You can view the translation of the entire sentence, or copy and paste specific Chinese words along with their English definitions to essentially create your own dictionary. The program offers great flexibility. There is a machine translation feature, but sometimes it provides rather bizarre translations. Basically, I prefer to do my own translations. You can do both if you wish. You can also hover over individual Chinese characters or words and a pop-up window will appear showing the Chinese characters along with a range of possible English definitions. In addition to 5000 sentences, I also have a book of Chinese fables and an abridged version of the novel The Three Kingdoms, that I scanned. I've made some WMA files for Chinese Fables and the Three Kingdoms that I can listen to while reading the books, but again I find I can follow them much better when playing them on a computer. So I guess I'll keep doing that for the time being, at least until my Chinese gets a lot better. I posted some screenshots of the program above.

Pros
  • Recognizes over 13,000 Traditional Chinese Characters and 6,700 Simplified Chinese Characters
Cons
  • Could have chosen a newer model