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Comment by indentit | Hacker News Reader

This is the first time I've ever seen it explained how input methods allow users to write in languages like Chinese using the Latin letters A-Z: phonetics. I had always wondered about this, it seemed like some arcane magic to me lol, how people knew what to type.

It's now clear that for someone like me - whom only understands a few Latin based languages - a super comprehensive tutorial would be required if one wanted to understand enough about other languages to be able to work on a text editor etc. I guess ideally all teams working on such projects would have an experienced team member whose native language isn't Latin based.

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You can try out how it works with Google Translate, for languages like Chinese, Japanese etc. they have a button in the bottom right corner of the text field where you can toggle to an IME input system. It's pretty intuitive, basically you just write the word phonetically and then press space, and it'll automatically replace the characters and let you choose alternatives. Smartphones have similar systems but with different layouts.

Chinese here. To be a little picky, phonetics is just one of the several methods to input Chinese. (Pinyin is the dominant one, and yes it is phonetics, other ways uses shapes of the characters and maybe a lot faster, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method for example.)

Speaking of input methods I always with there are good English input methods, it will be useful too! For example if user enters "compre" the input methods goes 1. comprehension 2. comprehensive (with an order depending on the conditional probability -- there is some interesting math behind input prediction, and with their help input can be a lot smooth, however I only see it used on phones not computers.)

>however I only see it used on phones not computers //

IDEs do prediction for input.

OpenOffice used to predict words longer than say 5 characters, IIRC, it might have been back in the Star Office iteration. Come to think of it I write in a widower so little now I've only just realised that this feature might have been disabled as a default (or removed).

This barely scratches the complexity of IMEs. For example Hong Kong mainly speak a different dialect of chinese, Cantonese. So pinyin (mandarin phonetics) is useless.

Most people type with Cangjie instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Cangjie

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