On the technology front, one of the coolest things I learned about in China is a Windows Mobile and Palm OS app called PlecoDict. The app is designed to make looking up Chinese characters faster than you could ever do with traditional paper or type in dictionaries by using the handwriting recognition built into portable devices. As I've already learned, one of the biggest frustrations in learning Chinese is remembering the meaning of the thousands of characters. Looking up characters manually takes minutes per character with traditional characters. Looking them up using a stylus takes mere seconds. Anyone who travels to Asia with a Treo should definitely own this app. If Microsoft were smart, they'd enlist the company to make a Tablet PC version of this dictionary too because it would extend the usefulness of tablets tremendously.
