Penpower Chinese Expert (Pen Scanner Edition)

I love Penpower Chinese Expert. I've taken courses in conversational Chinese, but at present am more interested in expanding my vocabulary so that I can improve my reading. To that end, I recently obtained a publication of the 5,000 most frequently used words in Chinese accompanied by 5,000 sample sentences illustrating their use. I've been scanning the sentences into my computer using Penpower Chinese Expert. I've scanned in about 3,000 sentences so far, and have learned a ton of vocabulary along the way. For me the words seem to stick better when I see and hear them used in actual sentences.Penpower Chinese Expert can be a little quirky. Sometimes it scans a different character than what's on the page. Sometimes it assigns a different Pinyin pronunciation to the character, or applies an incorrect tone. You need to watch out for this. There are various editing functions built into the program to help you make corrections.You can scan your Chinese text directly into the Penpower program, but I've found it works better if you scan it into a Microsoft Word document first, make your corrections there, and then copy and paste into the Penpower program.The voice that reads the sentences back to you is rather wooden and mechanical, but you get used to it after awhile. You can speed it up or slow it down. You can convert the Penpower files into WMA files, which you can play on your MP3 player. Interestingly, if you have the Penpower voice slowed down, the resulting WMA files will speak slower. If Penpower is set up to speak more rapidly, the resulting WMA files will also speak more rapidly.I've found that I prefer listening to my sentences on the computer rather than on my MP3 player. For one thing, the computer highlights the individual words as they are spoken, so it's easier to follow along. Also, you can add your own notes right below the sentences. You can display a translation of the whole sentence, or copy and paste specific Chinese words, along with their English definitions, essentially making up your own vocabulary list. The program offers a lot of flexibility.There is a machine translation function, but it gives some pretty bizarre translations sometimes. Mostly, I prefer to do my own translations. You can do both if you like. Also you can hover your cursor over individual Chinese characters or words, and box will pop up showing the Chinese characters along with a number of possible English definitions.In addition to the 5,000 sentences, I also have a book of Chinese fables, and an abbreviated version of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which I've been scanning in. I made up some WMA files for the Chinese fables and the Three Kingdoms, which I can listen to while reading the books, but again I found that I can follow them much better when I play them back on the computer. So I'll probably continue to do that for the time being, at least until my Chinese gets a lot better.I've posted some screen shots of the program above. The screen shots give a little better picture of some of the things I've talked about in my review.

DO NOT PURCHASE. An absolute waste of time and money. The software in incompatible and the product is unreturnable. Their reason for not accepting a refund is because the product contains a software. If you have a new version of Windows like most people, then do not waste your time with this purchase. Expensive. Non returnable for reasons that don't even make sense!

I bought the Pen Scanner for my son, who lives and works in China, and is studying the Chinese Language. He is very happy with the device and finds it quite useful in his studies.

I'm a Chinese teacher and my friend recommends this for me. This is a great teaching material and helps my student a lot. A lot of features in this tool and inspire them to read more Chinese books. I just want to share my experience when I use this with my students.1. I could choose any teaching material and scan into computer. I don't need to type whole article anymore. In addition, It is easy for us to put pinying on the top of every phrase and they would practice their pronunciation by listening to TTS(text-to-speech).2. My students can record their voice in special file and send to me. I would correct what they are saying. Also, I can record my voice and send to them, so they will have more options to learn speaking.3. This software with big Chinese character database can show every stroke for students. They can follow it step by step.4.Every meaning aside Chinese phrase helps them to read whole article easily, so I don't need to explain every phrase for them. It really saves our time and makes our class more fun.

Allow me to quote from a newsletter first:+++ quote begins +++Chinese is quickly becoming a popular study choice as a foreign language but it can still be difficult to find resources and tools to support a Chinese learning environment. Penpower Chinese Expert provides the right setup by immersing learners in a Mandarin listening and speaking setting -- but with a twist.Unlike most other Chinese language programs Penpower is a learning TOOL; not curriculum or teaching materials, but a customizable, open end tool that allows students to use it in their own way:1. Open-end Tool# Penpower Chinese Expert uses phrase segmentation, speech recognition, text to speech technology, optical character recognition, handwriting and even machine translation software to basically convert any resource into a digital format.# Students can utilize any resource; magazines, books, and newspapers, and transform them into learning materials.# Students can also use the copy/paste function to turn Web-based articles and other digital formats into learning materials.2. Immediate Feedback# The Penpower tools combine a number of different elements to create a language environment that supports reading/writing, speech, and listening skills development.# Students can strengthen listening comprehension with the clearly pronounced text feature.# Students improve their speech ability with instant speech recognition correction feedback and oral exams.# Reading comprehension develops through the use of an onscreen phrase dictionary and online dictionary.# Student handwriting skills, an important element of learning Chinese, are supported through handwriting recognition technology.# Penpower Chinese Expert also provides a user community where students can share learning materials and encourage one another in the process.+++ quote ends +++I found this newsletter captured the essence of this product. It provides you a total immersion environment for learning the Chinese language. If you are taking an online class or a class in school, this tool is like a 24x7 personal tutor with you.1. The pen scanner is a powerful tool by itself. There are 13000+ traditional Chinese characters used in Taiwan, 6700+ simplified Chinese characters used in mainland China. The scanner recognizes them all. In addition, the scanner also recognize 4000+ Hong Kong characters, Japanese characters and English. It's really handy when you want to turn printed text into electronic form. Great for students!2. You can use the tool to convert traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters.3. The tool provides stroke orders for all the Chinese characters (13000+ traditional and 6700+ simplified). You can practice your handwriting either with a mouse or a tablet, it will tell you when your handwriting is recognizable.4. The tool provides pinyin or zhuyin for all the Chinese characters. You can even put pinyin on traditional characters, or zhuyin on simplified Chinese characters5. The tool provides Chinese English dictionary and phrase dictionary.6. The most valuable feature is "sentence segmentation", it breaks up a sentence into smaller components to aid your comprehension of the sentence. Then you can use your mouse to hover over them to see the English meaning.7. You can hear mandarin pronunciation in TTS for characters, phrases or sentences. You can also record your own speech, and playback too.8. When you are all alone, the speech recognition feature comes in handy. You practice on the phrases, and the software will tell you right away how good your pronunciation is.9. The translation feature built-in is just as good as yahoo or google translate if not better.10. The community share is a great feature for fellow Chinese learners to share their Penpower Chinese Expert files. [...]11. There is a blog located at penpower-chinese-expert.blogspot.com to share a young girl's experience of learning Chinese.

Sorry I could not get this to work at all..... not very intuitive and poor instructions.... like you're a mind reader at how to use it.

Works bad.