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Comment by fengwick3 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting points, but minor correction here. Typing Chinese efficiently has to do with the input method. Using pinyin as you suggest is actually hopelessly slow as you would have to first recall the precise pronunciation of the word (the -n vs -ng for example), type the pinyin, then scroll through the (normally) massive list of words. Of course, things like fuzzy pinyin and context aware suggestions help, but adopting an input method based on the character radical composition or handwriting recognition is much faster.

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> "Using pinyin as you suggest is actually hopelessly slow"

Everyone I've encountered in China seems to do it just fine. It is only hopelessly slow if you type one character at a time.

> "adopting an input method based on the character radical composition or handwriting recognition is much faster"

What character radical input method are you talking about? I can't imagine any input method using radical composition being faster, it would be comparable to using Latin roots to type out English words; there are just too many to be practical. You can actually do this on Pleco, but it takes forever, even longer than typing one character at a time in pinyin.

Handwriting could work assuming you can handwrite Chinese quickly (I would be deathly slow as I can't read a typical handwritten cursive note, much less write one). I think handwriting recognition is already pretty good, people just use pinyin because it's the easiest.

The wubi input method (五笔字形) uses radical composition or something like it -- keys represent different (semi-arbitrary) character portions, and you "build" characters by choosing the portions, and adding other keys that indicate the overall shape of the character. You can get nearly any character out there in four keys, usually much less, and it also does phrase input. It's much harder to learn, obviously, but a practiced wubi typist is supposed to be able to go faster than pinyin.

Over the years I've tried to teach myself, and I can sort of do it, but I never got fast enough to really switch away from pinyin.

Pinyin is just fine (or zhuyin in my case), but the parent is right about one thing. Structure based inputs like Cangjie and Wubi are really fast. Fewer strokes per character and zero need to select from a list mean more speed.

From what I've seen, it is mostly Southerners (南方人) or Western people taught by Southerners who have trouble with distinguishing between endings such as -n and -ng.

Also, pinyin IMEs can be fairly fast even with only minimal practice as the matching is done at the word level (and possibly some IMEs look at preceeding characters) rather than at the character level. For example, when entering 南方人, my tying sequence was "nanfangren<space>", and the IME was already suggesting the correct answer at "r", so I could have actually typed "nanfangr<space>".

There are also a lot of phrases that can be typed with just the first letter from each word, eg typing "bth" gives "不太好", "zmy" gives "怎么样", and there are endless more combinations like this.

"nfr" gives me "南方人"

I can't remember seeing anybody using anything but pinyin input, foreigners and locals alike. You can compose entire sentences and let the software pick the correct hanzi in bulk.

I've never seen a Chinese person using handwriting input, even though it's widely available on smartphones. They all use pinyin input because it's easiest and fastest.

Handwriting is widely used by 50+ yo people in China. The pinyin system was not taught when they were young.

I can confirm. My girlfriends father needed a new phone and he needed a phone with character recognition.

I dont recall seeing any of my friends or colleagues here using this feature.

I write on my iPhone and use pinyin on my Linux, Mac and Windows computers. I'd like to write Cantonese and Japanese too, but I don't do that enough to bother finding the relevant input software. Using a hiragana table is much slower for me than writing the characters using my index finger.

It is useful when you are trying to type a character that you cannot quite pronounce/pronounce erroneously. It happens quite often even with Chinese people. With this input you can simply imitate the strokes.

That's definitely true. But for average day-to-day text input, people seem to vastly prefer the "hopelessly slow" pinyin method.

> first recall the precise pronunciation of the word (the -n vs -ng for example)

I am a foreigner living in China and this was never an issue for me, so I doubt the native people here find that a problem.

I rarely see any Chinese people use the handwriting character recognition on their phones. I use it sometimes just for practice, but just writing pinyin is much faster.

I could imagine skip[0] being quite efficient. I doubt any native speaker would use it, though. I have used multiple radical lookup systems before, and they are not in any way efficient. I don't speak Chinese, but I do a fair bit of writing in Japanese and phonetic input is very, very quick (especially with context sensitive completion).

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodansha_Kanji_Learner%27s_Dic...

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