Besta MT-7000 - Two Way Chinese-English Electronic Dictionary and E-Tutor

Excellent aid. Has good study guides. Translation of sentences is sometimes inaccurate, but good enough to get the meaning across. Hearing the Chinese words pronounced helps a lot. There is a lot of dynamite in this small package. Touch screen is nice.

Unfortunately I am not able to rate this product positively because despite the fact that I purchased this item on May 21 and paid for EXPEDITED shipping my niece in China has not received the dictionary. I am upset and disappointed as this is an expensive item. Supposedly the item got to The People's Republic of China but my niece did not get the item!!!! It is very unfortunate that my buying experience with Amazon and this 3rd party seller is tarnished by this item not being delivered/lost or stolen...bottom line is my niece who is a medical student in China cannot get the dictionary to help with her course. Ironically I bought some flash cards (approx $16) and she got these in a few days and is loving the cards but the expensive item has not shown up!!! What a bummer!!! Be very careful when there is a 3rd Party Seller!!!!!

I've bought for two reasons. First to do sentence translation from english to Chinese. Second as a learning tool to help me learn the language. In both areas the product is a little bit better then OK and in some areas very good. Some background, I'v been to China 6 times so far - each time with a electronic translator of some kind. I started out with a simple BBK 100, simple unit worked well, did the job only 120.00 not feature rich but then again did the job. It ate batteries and had a poor backlight LCD display; but it did the job, luck would have it I lost it. I buy another one, go to China again, same unit but no backlight and ate batteries. So, I'm in China, find myself in an IT type mall (what fun) and I run into a vendor selling translators. I pickup a Besta unit designed for the Chinese market, was pretty nice. Managed to get it work in english mode. Good display, good rechargeable battery etc. Translations was pretty good, but not better then the 120.00 BBK; but i could see the screen. It saved my bacon. However, it had a serious problem after 20 mins of sentence translation it would reboot - was terrible. Digging into the unit it had a software version of 1.0 and you couldn't update the thing.Going back to China, so I decided to get a new Besta unit as they seem to be good and some sort of market leader. The one I got in Beijing was good, but the reboot issue an lack of support was a show stopper. Perhaps a shiny new updated unit designed for the english market would be much better and if it rebooted, well i could probably get better support. So I went and spent the nearly 400.00 for this unit. First off, it's got a really nice display, easy to see, good colors and great battery life. Sentence translation isn't any better then my other units, but this is an area that is tricky to get right. The learning materials in the unit aren't bad, some are very good - like chinese classroom (an SD card that came with it). The E-C dictionaries are good. It also has some nice PIM features but in the age of iPhones these are useless features to me.My real grip with the unit is that it doesn't offer enough learning material for english speakers to learn Mandarin. It has way too many learning tools for Chinese speakers to learn english - but I thought this was designed for the english speaking market (i called Besta to confirm this). So overall, it is a fairly good unit. It is well built. A little expensive and it does make for a good electronic dictionary. I just wished it had a better interface, more learning tools for english speakers. The PM features are ok, but a waste of resources (if you've got a smart phone). I would recommend this unit if the learning materials for english speakers were better, however, at nearly 400.00 in its current state of development I couldn't recommend it. Besta could help itself, by simply making their website more accessible to english speakers for updating the unit and downloading more material - but in its current state, their website is terrible. I do plan on keeping the unit (hoping this will get better via their website). I'll be taking it to china in a week and we'll see if it's better then others I've got.Update:Took this little unit on a 10 day trip to China. The unit perfumed as expected but no better then any others I have used that cost 1/4 the price. So if your price sensitive - don't waste your money on this. Some strong points, the battery life is really good. A charge lasted a good day (and I mean using the thing). Display is very good and easy to read. Maddening feature, font size. I found a way to get the chinese characters to show large after the translation - which was great. Then I did something and it went back to like a 10pt font and I couldn't for the life of me get it back to something like an 18pt font.I'm lowering my recommendation by a star due to it's performance, clunky interface and cost. The unit is nice, translation is no better then units costing 1/4 the price. But for the price, it's hard to recommend hence lowering my rating to 3 stars.

English is not widely spoken in China like it is in Japan or even Thailand. English is more common in the business sector in China than it is in the general population but in either case it is spotty. Since I am going by myself I wanted some sort of language crutch in the event I could not get my point across. I looked at several devices and settled on the Ectaco. The Ectaco was nearly twice as much and at first seemed like the better unit. Well, after using it for a while I started to become concerned that it was not going to be very useful so I bought the Besta MT-7000 as an alternate.The Besta MT-7000 is the one to get. It is less expensive, easier to use, and provides much more accurate translations. I had a friend from Shanghai confirm the accuracy of the English to Chinese translation. Several simple sentences were input to both devices such as "How are you?" and "Where is the Subway?". The Ectaco translations made zero sense to my Chinese friend but the Besta translations were close enough and in some cases were perfect.It should be understood that English and Chinese are so different that there is no automated one-to-one translation device or software that can translate with any degree of accuracy. Even Google translation is pretty weak. This is not the fault of the devices or the software - you simply must have a human do the translation if you want to get the meaning across. Software cannot decipher the speakers meaning and that is where the translations break down. When meaning is attempted it can yield results ranging from funny to catastrophic. Many languages can be translated with a high degree of accuracy with a device like this but not so with a language as complex and about as far away from English as you can get as Chinese is.So there is no perfect solution for English - Chinese or Chinese - English translations other than to have a translator with you.The Besta MT-7000 is about as close as you can get and I recommend this if you are a first time visitor to China particularly if you are going alone.