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There are several iterations of most popular input methods in mainland China (Cangjie is only used in HongKong area): 1. Numerous attempts were made by many pe

There are several iterations of most popular input methods in mainland China (Cangjie is only used in HongKong area): 1. Numerous attempts were made by many people, try to encode thousands of Chinese characters in keyboard. The most popular one is Wubi, which can describe single character in 4 keystroke so you don't need to select from options. It's used by professional typewriters, and many regular users spend a lot of time to learn the system. 2. pinyin IME was improved, provided better prediction and word input(input a multi character word directly, instead one by one), it's acceptable even you need to select from a list, and you don't need to learn a system. Most casual users used the one provided by Windows Chinese version. 3. Whole sentence IME appeared, which was trained with Chinese text corpus, try to predict a whole sentence when you just input the pinyin for all of them. This proved to be short-lived since you still need to adjust several places in many cases, even it can get 100% correct in 30% cases. 4. All major IT companies start to develop their own IME as a method to collect user input and provide an entrance to their product. 5. An old IME: double pinyin start to gain more popularity. It's still pinyin, but you can use 2 letter to encode the whole pinyin instead of 4 or 6 letters. All newer IME can switch between different encoding methods, like pinyin, double pinyin, strokes. 6. Senior users tend to just use handwriting in smartphone.

vorg 9y ago
Modern Chinese IME's use the pinyin-based predictive input methods (#1) as the primary method, together with a wubi-style method (#2) as a secondary input method. E.g. in the Sogou IME, if you type the 'u' (which can never begin any pinyin syllable), you can then type letters to denote strokes or common components, such as h for heng 一 , s for shu 丨 , p for pie 丿 , k for kou 口 , s for shui 水氺 or 氵 , etc. Can be useful to distinguish between characters for commonly used syllables such as 'yi', 'ji', etc. Regarding #5, I found it's difficult to switch from normal pinyin to shuangpin (double pinyin) in one go, and none of the shuangpin methods or software provide staged switching. E.g. a shuangpin IME could allow me to use 'i', 'u' and 'v' to type 'ch', 'sh' and 'zh', but continue to use the existing vowel combinations (e.g. 'ue', 'ao') for stage 1 pinyin/shuangpin typing, and then offer at stage 2 shortcuts for some of the vowel combos only when I had gotten into the habit of the stage 1 shortcuts. Of course the choice of shortcuts available would then be constrained by the staged learning path, but because there's so many different shuangpin IME's available, each with differing key assignments and none of them standard, there's probably still room in the market for a new key assignment that caters to such staged learning.

vorg 9y ago

Modern Chinese IME's use the pinyin-based predictive input methods (#1) as the primary method, together with a wubi-style method (#2) as a secondary input method. E.g. in the Sogou IME, if you type the 'u' (which can never begin any pinyin syllable), you can then type letters to denote strokes or common components, such as h for heng 一 , s for shu 丨 , p for pie 丿 , k for kou 口 , s for shui 水氺 or 氵 , etc. Can be useful to distinguish between characters for commonly used syllables such as 'yi', 'ji', etc. Regarding #5, I found it's difficult to switch from normal pinyin to shuangpin (double pinyin) in one go, and none of the shuangpin methods or software provide staged switching. E.g. a shuangpin IME could allow me to use 'i', 'u' and 'v' to type 'ch', 'sh' and 'zh', but continue to use the existing vowel combinations (e.g. 'ue', 'ao') for stage 1 pinyin/shuangpin typing, and then offer at stage 2 shortcuts for some of the vowel combos only when I had gotten into the habit of the stage 1 shortcuts. Of course the choice of shortcuts available would then be constrained by the staged learning path, but because there's so many different shuangpin IME's available, each with differing key assignments and none of them standard, there's probably still room in the market for a new key assignment that caters to such staged learning.