Comment by achou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by achou | Hacker News Reader

To understand the impact of Pinyin, all you have to do is take a look at the alternative input sources for Chinese on your computer or phone.

On my Mac it's under Settings -> Keyboard -> Input Sources. Add a new input source for Select Chinese (Simplified) and take a look at the alternatives:

- Stroke, which uses only symbol characters and numbers to "write" words. Good luck with that!

- Trackpad handwriting. You "write" the characters on your trackpad and it recognizes them. Works pretty well if you already know how to write the characters. But it's much, much slower in my opinion. Plus, you need to memorize how to write thousands of characters and how the characters connect to how the words sound, which there is no systematic mapping for.

- Wubi Xing, which I'm unfamiliar with but seems radical based. Just look at the keyboard - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method

- Pinyin, which uses your regular English keyboard. With a little training, you can sound out Chinese words and immediately type them with autocorrect-like functionality that works amazingly well. I can type Chinese almost as fast as English this way.

In short, Pinyin has made it possible for Chinese people to operate efficiently in the modern world we live in.

Zhuyin is conspicuous by its absence - it maps perfectly well to modern keyboards, and requires slightly less letters to write a word ("en" and "an" in pinyin are one glyph, for example).

It's an invented 20th century alphabet, which means there's logic behind it - the left side of the keyboard are initial consonants, in the middle are the vowels, and at the end are vowels with trailing consonants on them like "ang" and "en". Even the consonants on the left have a logical order - the first column are sounds you make with your lips (b, p, m, f), then with the tip of your tongue (d, t, n, l) then the tongue goes further back in you throat (g, k, h).

It really is a well designed phonetic alphabet, tailor-made to mandarin. And the IMEs for it let you filter your characters by typing a tone - none of the Pinyin ones I tried let me do that which was my main reason for switching.

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.

This is the main input for japanese as well, I love it and wish an english version was offered

Cellphone 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.

though 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

Simple example using Pinyin: 你好吗 is "Hello, how are you?". In Pinyin you'd type: "ni hao ma?".

It sounds like this: https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/你好吗？

I can type fine with Zhuyin keyboard... Shame you an only buy them in Hong Kong and Taiwan tho :(

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