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A funny thing about how the Chinese type on their phones is that not only they use Pinyin, but they use the old-school numeric input method (2="abc", 3="def", e
by Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
A funny thing about how the Chinese type on their phones is that not only they use Pinyin, but they use the old-school numeric input method (2="abc", 3="def", etc., like SMS in the pre-smartphone era) to type it. Or at least that's what I saw most people do when I went to Beijing, maybe in other regions/demographics it's different.
I find it rather amusing that while in the West we use 30 keys to type our around 30 characters, in China they use 10 keys to type their thousands of characters.
Also, it's probably not a bad idea for those of us with a tendency to fat-finger (like myself). I was quite faster writing messages on pre-smartphone keyboards than on smartphone ones (although probably a large part of that is physical key feedback vs. virtual keys). I'd definitely give a 10-key option a try on my smartphone, but it isn't offered.
- astronautjones 10y agoThis is the main input for japanese as well, I love it and wish an english version was offered
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoCellphone number pad input is very well-suited to Japanese: each key is a row of kana. When I type Japanese on my phone, I always use the number pad input these days.
- Markoff 10y agothough T9 typing ain't as accurate as QWERTY, my wife was very happy to switch to Google pinyin keyboard which support QWERTY layout unlike most of the Chinese keyboards which use T9 which must guess much more based on your input so it's less accurate than QWERTY input, the thing is most of Chinese keyboards don't have this option or people are not aware of it, it also helps keep consistent layout when switching between English and Chinese