User Comments
Here is what some users are saying about Clavis Sinica. For a more complete selection of user comments, please see our email message log. To post your own comments, you can send us an email or visit our User Forums.
"The very best thing about the program is the instant translation feature. It is fabulous being able to zap through a text and look up all the words you don't know instantly. It's the equivalent of an earthbound snail learning to fly. I would like to improve my reading of newspaper texts and other articles that I can download from the web. At the moment I'm finding that painfully slow going and Clavis suddenly makes it seem very easy." —Gesa Walker, International Consultant, Edinburgh
"I love the program - it's VERY good, is reasonably-priced, and one can download it immediately from the Net without having to endure weeks of waiting and additional shipment costs. I like very much the facility known as "view all compounds using a character." Occasionally, I cannot recall the first character of a certain compound word but the last character remains in my memory - with Clavis Sinica, I can retrieve that word when I run a search for the last character, and voila!! For example, the word for 'advanced' is 'xian1jin4'. After a few days, only jin4 remains in my memory. No hard-copy dictionary is available in the market that allows me to do a search on jin4 to find 'xian1jin4.' Even a reverse English to Chinese search may not reveal the same compound word that I need. With Clavis Sinica, I can search for 'jin4' and one of the many words that appear is 'xian1jin4' and I'm happy again! Thank you very much again for making life easier for adult learners like myself." —Kwee Tat Chew, Regulatory Affairs Associate, Singapore
"Since 2002, students in the Chinese Language Program at the United Nations, who are staff members and diplomats of the UN, have been using Clavis Sinica and they found that the software is extremely useful in their study of Chinese. Specifically they like the following features: The possibility to quickly find the meaning and the pronunciation of a Chinese character or word. It saves them a tremendous amount of time in looking up a word in a traditional Chinese dictionary. The information provided for the study of Chinese characters. The ability to quickly search a Chinese word by its English equivalent. Many students regard Clavis Sinia as a magic tool and our program presents it as the only suggested software to purchase to our students. We highly recommended it to all students of Chinese." —Yong Ho, Chinese Language Program Director, United Nations
"Though I am a fluent speaker of Mandarin, I have let my reading skills lapse since the last time I was in China, mainly because I can't enjoy reading when I have to stop to look up characters. Clavis Sinica takes the dictionary-induced eyestrain and boredom out of reading Chinese; it's made it much easier for me to read online news articles, and has really improved my reading. This program is going to change the way people in this country learn to read Chinese." —Eric Hayot, Director of the Program in Asian Studies, Penn State University
"The beauty of Clavis Sinica lies in its use of mnemonic aids and its ease of use. The latter derives from the fact that it was expressly designed for beginning and intermediate students and therefore is not cluttered with rare readings, compounds, or rarely used functions which might confuse the user of some commercial software. The characters appear in large fonts and the audible pronunciations are crisp and in absolutely perfect Mandarin." —Martin J. Powers, Past Director of the Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan
"I think this program is extremely useful because it gives all the information any student of Chinese would want about characters or pronunciation, all in one place. Reading a Chinese text becomes a much more feasible and enjoyable process when you don't have to spend a long time using several different resource books at once. Clavis Sinica is very useful in helping students of Chinese build connections between new characters and ones they've seen before." —Eleanor Robinson, Student, University of Michigan
"Clavis Sinica is a very useful learning tool for students of Chinese—I found it easy to understand and user-friendly, and it solves the time-consuming problem of reaching for a dictionary, identifying the radical, and looking up the word all in one package. It's easy to learn about all components of a character and its related compounds all at once, which was my favorite aspect of the program. . . . I liked that everything was clickable, from the simplest words like "wo" to the new vocabulary in each lesson. This provided me with ample opportunity to refresh my knowledge of all vocabulary, no matter when I'd learned it. The flexibility to switch between traditional and simplified fonts was also useful." —Crystal Wong, Student, University of Michigan
For additional user comments, please see the email message log.
