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Comment by cheatdeath | Hacker News Reader

In Hong Kong, I sometimes see peoples screens when I'm using public transport. WhatsApp audio recordings are very popular, sometimes I can see the entire conversation is just audio recordings back and forth. Other times it's Chinese (I can't differentiate which), sometimes English, often a mix. I've only seen someone drawing characters with his finger once.

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Keep an eye out for either Pinyin or Zhuyin. I believe they are somewhat common for texting purposes. You input this stuff and your device starts displaying characters for you to pick from avoiding the slower process of actually drawing characters.

Links for those unfamiliar with those two things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

I guess I've just been assuming any Roman characters are English, some definitely might be Pinyin. I generally try not to stare at peoples screens for too long haha. I did an intro to Chinese (Mandarin) class a few years ago so I'm aware of Pinyin but have forgotten almost everything (except some of the bits I found particularly interesting like word order for times and places, how numbers are represented and a few other things).

This is a useful reference for hanyu pinyin/tones: http://lost-theory.org/chinese/phonetics/

> drawing characters

It's only drawing if one doesn't write the language. If I have forgotten how to write a character and have to refer to a dictionary, I'll still be writing the character, not drawing it. Compare/contrast with my trying to write Thai, Tamil, Arabic, etc - then I'll be drawing.

Personally I write Chinese on the iPhone/iPad using my index finger much faster than I enter pinyin. I find that iOS's character recognition is fairly good - as long as I get the stroke order right, even though what I have written looks like random scribbling on screen, most of the time it presents the right character.

Although in the case of Hong Kong, neither Pinyin input nor Zhuyin input are likely to be used, as both are based on the phonetics of standard Mandarin Chinese. There are alternative input methods that are shape-based (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp...) such as the Cangjie, and Cantonese-only input methods.

I actually have not come across Cangjie before and it looks really interesting. Thank you for the link :)

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