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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

I find autocorrect so annoying it's always the first thing I disable when getting a phone. Sure I make more typos, but at least the phone doesn't keep trying to think instead of me.

Actually, the most mistakes I've ever made when sending blurbs of texts was the several months before I figured out how to disable autocorrect on Tweetbot on my Mac. Man that was terrible. Kept having to delete tweets because I hit "Send" before fixing the autocorrected text.

Alas, if you frequently use two different languages and often mix them both in the same sentence (common among bilinguals) autocorrect is your absolute bane because it will always do the wrong thing.

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I have found that SwiftKey basically lets me blindly mash the keyboard in the direction of the keys I want to press and it will insert the correct words, and I use three languages (English/Spanish/Greek).

I'll have to try if that exists for iOS then ...

The sticking point for me, so far, has been when I use an English word but declense it like it was a Slovenian word. Every time I do that, autocorrect thinks I can't type even though I typed exactly what I wanted to.

And with 18 different declension suffixes for nouns and ~15 for verbs and proverbs, it would take autocorrect ages to learn how to spell. Especially since the correct spelling is context dependant and usually only a letter different than the wrong spellings.

As far as I know, SwiftKey uses a Markov chain with length 2 or 3, so it can usually decline the words correctly and give you the right one. Greek is similar, and I have no problems there (it does sometimes screw up two-word letters that only differ by one letter, though).

Yeah, I've been contemplating disabling autocorrect system-wide on my Mac because of how infuriating it is. It's not as useful because I'm much more accurate with a physical keyboard, it's more difficult to cancel a correction because I have to move my hand off the keyboard to my mouse or trackpad then click a tiny "x", and frankly it's often just an absurd correction.

To cancel it, you can just hit escape when the correction is displayed.

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