Chinese Input method editors

我喜歡倉頡輸入法

ha - i just figured that one out and was about to let you know. Missed your "I found it" comment. There are two choices actually - canjie and new canjie. I chose new and will play some. I still have some questions re trad vs simplified. Im sure we can flesh all this out but I am thinking this system would help one learn characters. Before now I have always dismissed this as unnecessary. Lets play.

exactly RJ. Yeah, I saw both choices and went for new canjie also. You've also hit on one of the reasons I decided to look into it. Namely ,to date I have just been recognising characters by sight rather than analysing them,mainly because I haven't gotten round to learning the radicals. However as vocabulary builds and the differences between some characters is subtle I am mindful of some advice Pete gave a very long ago that recognising them by sight alone becomes difficult at some point. I think it's time to follow that advice and learn the radicals at least. I was also looking at the 4 corner method. Neither canjie or the 4 corner method specifically uses radicals necessarily but at least it does get one focussing on the structure of the character.

btw I'd really prefer to go for option 3 [which didn't seem to be there and thus may have to be downloaded I guess]...namely speed cangjie. As you may have seen, with speed cangjie you only need to extract the first and last mnemonic and thus it's meant to be very fast.

你好

嬤 麻 馬 罵 嗎 吗

嘞

了 咯

this bopomofo looks like it also has the potential to be fast as for a character like zheng [5 letters in pinyin] ..you would only need 2 keystrokes plus one for the tone [and as tone is included it must therefore on average cut down about 4/5 of your options ]. I guess how good the ime is at predicting is an important factor too. Google pinyin I found much better in this regard than microsoft pinyin.

btw is it true they're still planning to phase out bopomofo in Taiwan?

I've always found 五笔画 very useful for looking up characters of which I don't know the pinyin in my phone dictionary. It's actually not too difficult to learn, but a basic understanding of stroke types/order is essential. Once you've got that though, it's can be quite useful. (Of course, these days, with apps like Pleco and Nciku, you can just write in the character, but it's somehow less satisfying that way...)

Yes, you beat me to it! I was just about to write something very similar. I find that learning 五笔画 has been one of the most useful things I have done while studying Chinese. After learning it, I generally use my phone dictionary much more than my little electronic dictionary with stylus because I find it to be much quicker and less cumbersome. The other benefit is that it is like a poor man's Skritter. My stroke order has vastly improved since using this input method. In the beginning it was somewhat hard because I didn't have an intuitive sense, and there were even times when I stubbornly sat in front of my cell for up to fifteen minutes trying to figure out the stroke order. I can't say I don't have problems anymore, but I usually can figure the stroke order on the first try.

yes this canjie is not so intuitive in some cases. I was just about to ask if wubi wouldnt be more useful. Im thinking that one makes more sense for us.

Isnt it 五笔划？

I never tried the canjie, so I wouldn't be able to comment like baba, but wubi is not nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I still use pinyin for inputing if I know the pinyin, though.

I use my phone for calls and texting, not as a dictionary (mainly because it only works as English-Chinese, optimised for the native Chinese speaker). I use my electronic dictionary mostly these days and will write the character if I can rather than use pinyin (to improve my writing), although as xiao_phil says the pinyin is sometimes faster (depends on the character.) I'm guessing that 5 stroke input is always or at least mostly slower than using an electronic dictionary, and slower than entering pinyin for texting. If I forget the pinyin I find another word - bit of a cheat. Also the pinyin entry is pretty intelligent, throwing up the next likely character.

But I see that it could be satisfying to have 5 stroke input as an option - this has encouraged me to practice. Well, learn it first, then practice.

sorry mate,I was just trying out a couple of the ime's and making sure it worked by posting it....it's mostly gibberish. Yeah, I was intending to look into wubi as well. Good suggestion.

thanks Jason. It's great to get everyone's opinion on this. :)

I'm really keen to give this one a shot now. I'll look up how I get it installed unless you or anyone else has a quick tip on the best way to go about installing it.

thanks RJ. Rather than learning the code for characters in that way though I'm approaching it from the opposite angle. That is see if I can work it out myself and then use mdbg if I choose one of the mnemonics wrong. I don't want to memorise a whole set of codes but rather learn how to use the system [but frequent use would no doubt mean a lot of the higher frequency codes would just be memorised anyhow]. Really not sure if I'll stick with this for long or not though. I guess this programme could be an easier fallback than mdbg though so thanks again.