Clavis Sinica, www.sinica.com

This is program on which you can cut and paste any text in Chinese characters and get the Pinyin and translation of the characters. This program is very useful to learn the characters. You can then build up Flashcards with the characters you have found. It is also very cheap.

This program has however some strong drawbacks:

• It is slow and get very often blocked when you do too many operations at the same time.
• The audio version that let you here the sound of the character is not very useful except for very beginners. If you want to hear a phrase or a sentence, the program just gives you the sound of one character after the other without the rhythm of the phrase.
• The flash cards module included is very basic. You cannot print the Flashcards, there is no random quiz option. The characters are always presented in the same order and you cannot cancel one if you already know it.