I found that as a beginner with only ten words, having all of the "a" entries didn't let me see how I could use it very well, because I was dealing with an unfamiliar program and an inpenetrable language at the same time. I needed to see wo, ni, hao, shi, before I could relate to it. Now a year later, I could do a lot more with the demo, but of course I've already bought it ;-)
So if you're revamping the trial, maybe you can find something that a total beginner can use and grow out of quicky, like a flashcard list of the 30 most common beginner words, which a beginner might work in runs of 5 or 10 to see how they all get covered over time. Advanced users could still pretend to get some wrong, to see how it works.
Maybe you could scribble out a simple beginners dictionary of say 50 or 100 common study words, to allow adding flashcards from that list to get the full experience, while still limiting the good dictionaries to their "a" words so that people can appreciate what their definitions have to offer. When I started, I couldn't fathom those dictionary entries at all, much less use them, but I could see they had substance that I would grow to benefit from greatly.
That's just an idea to illustrate the need during naive evaluation, so you might have better ideas, Mike.
