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Unless things have changed in the last 15 years, when I lived there most of my Taiwanese peers used bopomofo aka 注音 as their primary IME for smartphones / lapto
by vunderba 2y ago
Unless things have changed in the last 15 years, when I lived there most of my Taiwanese peers used bopomofo aka 注音 as their primary IME for smartphones / laptops / etc.
The few English ex-pats that I knew used the 搜狗 software which defaults to pinyin I think.
I mostly used pinyin on my laptop and bopomofo on my phone (old model that didn't support pinyin) which was mildly annoying. I constantly got it confused with my Japanese since I also read hiragana/katakana and some of the symbols are highly similar.
- eob 2y agoThis is still mostly true. Kids books also have bopomofo rubies, like the kana rubies in Japanese. And occasionally you'll see bopomofo as a typographic choice to represent a sound that feels more natural in Taiwanese amidst an otherwise Mandarin sentence. This is just my personal experience, but I think the big change in the past 15 years isn't Bopomofo -> Pinyin, but rather Wade Giles -> Pinyin. Bopomofo seems equally prevalent, but the Wade Giles romanizations on street signs have begin to get replaced with Pinyin for the sake of non-native speakers who are almost certainly more familiar with Pinyin than WG.