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He is just one of the early pioneers of Chinese input methods, his particular method is stroke-based and works on 0-9 number pads, went obsolete decades ago, but surely had an influence over later popular ones like Wubi.

Today, input methods were dominated by pronunciation based one like Pinyin. The heuristics based "smart" Pinyin input methods was actually invented by a non-tech folk and eventually hired by a then-large Internet company called Sogou, it was quite novel for the input method to suggest word pairs like a search engine with most frequent used ones readily type-able. Some later versions even include crazy macros like the current timestamp, emojis, or even read your contact list (!!) for quicker name & address suggestions.

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Pinyin is popular in the PRC, but not in Taiwan or HK. Taiwan input is dominated by Bopomofo, which is also pronunciation based. Mainland China is the largest country that uses Chinese input methods, however.

I still remember entering Chinese using a pinyin T9 method on my Nokia handset in 2002. Pinyin on a 0-9 number pad, fun times.

I used pinyin and bopomofo on Macs in the 90s, pre-OSX

The problem with pinyin is that it's phonetic based and it's based on Mandarin. For large sub-populations of Chinese speakers who primarily use other dialects, it's not as intuitive -- although this is changing overtime as Mandarin becomes more dominant across China. A stroke/character based system preserves a key characteristic of Chinese, which is that speakers of different Chinese dialects can all use the same writing system. However, I think Pinyin is easier for Mandarin speakers (in PRC at least) and also non-native Chinese speakers who likely come from a phonetic based writing system and have learned Mandarin using Pinyin.

> For large sub-populations of Chinese speakers who primarily use other dialects, it's not as intuitive

It's very different than alphabetical languages. Chinese texts (Han scripts) were much different than the the spoken language, it's like a bytecode or some serialization format. There are cases where verbal vocabulary not "serializable" in Chinese characters (not orthographically at least)

Pinyin may dominate in Mainland China, but places like Taiwan and Hong Kong still prefer their own input methods.

Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified characters and HK's Cantonese has an underused pinyin equivalent, but that isn't a cause. Other systems became prevalent first, and stuck.

Taiwan's Zhuyin is 90+% the same as Pinyin except the input is composed with Chinese script radicals (like hiragana) rather than Latin script.

> Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified

That doesn't impact the human side of the IME. It's just different output for the same input. And the input (Mandarin pronunciation) is the same for mainland and Taiwan.

There are differences in the Mandarin pronunciations standardized on the Mainland and Taiwan. Most of them involve using the fifth tone or not, but there are a few more noticeable exceptions, like 和 hé ㄏㄢˋ (which would correspond to pinyin hàn) and 崖 yá ㄧㄞˊ (which would correspond to pinyin yái).

Stuff like that occasionally trips me up when switching between pinyin and zhuyin.

和 is also hé/ㄏㄜˊ in Taiwan sometimes, as in 永和. Those differences aren’t intrinsic to Zhuyin or Pinyin.

Zhuyin aren’t Chinese radicals. They are derived from characters. For example the “b” sounds ㄅ comes from the character 包 bāo.

I thought Zhuyin was like kana because it was designed during the Japanese occupation?

Zhuyin was created on the Mainland during the ROC era, and brought to Taiwan after the Japanese surrender, where it is now the most prominent phonetic system. Prior to the KMT retreat to Taiwan, Mandarin was not widely spoken here. Before Japan colonized Taiwan, Taiwanese language (Minnan) was usually written using Latin characters with diacritics. During the Japanese colonial era, they attempted to introduce Taiwanese kana. I don't think usage has survived to present day, but I have met a few old people who can only speak Japanese and Taiwanese, but not Mandarin. Today Taiwanese is mostly a spoken language, but you can find it written. Sometimes it's a mixture of hanzi and Latin characters to supplement missing characters. I've heard that there is also an adapted Zhuyin used to write Taiwanese, but I've never seen an example of it.

tl;dr Zhuyin and and Taiwanese kana were developed during approximately the same time, but separately, and for separate languages.

Ah, ya, that was a dumb thought on my part then. Of course if it was initiated by the ROC, they wouldn't have been in Taiwan in the 1920s.

> Taiwan's Zhuyin is 90+% the same as Pinyin except the input is composed with Chinese script radicals

I wouldn't say that's true. It's phonetic, sure, but it relates much more closely to the syllable structure than Pinyin does.

Simple example: 南, Pinyin: nán, Zhuyin: ㄋㄢˊ

In Pinyin, we use the same letter "n" in initial and final position. In Zhuyin, the word is composed of two letters, ㄋ（initial n), and ㄢ (final an). The only time that ㄢ begins a syllable is when it's the whole syllable, e.g. 安, ㄢ, "ān"

It’s also far more consistent. The ü of Pinyin only has umlauts with l because lü and lu are both valid syllables. That the u of qu and ju is actually ü, and the u of chu and zhu is u is confusing, to say nothing of yong/-iong. In Zhuyin you have discrete ㄨ u and ㄩ ü, and yong doesn’t masquerade is a rare vowel, it’s just ㄩㄥ。

As a non-chinese pinyin input is so much easier. One of the cool things about it is you can type a whole sentence just using the first letter of each character. Eg “wxzdnwsmbq” on my phone is sufficient to produce “我想知道你为什么不去”. In English I’d have to type the whole sentence “I want to know why you didn’t go”.

The other great thing about it is if you remember the pronunciation of a word but forget the tone and/or character, it’s usually automatically corrected.

Isn’t that sort of like letting auto correct pick the sentences you are texting? One can definitely do that, it’s a cool novelty for Reddit posts, but it isn’t useful.

The nicer thing is they you can type timeless pinyin and then pick the characters you actually meant, useful if you can sort of recognize what you want to say.

Not really. It’s better than English word prediction, because you’re providing some info about what you want to say meaning it’s correct more of the time. You can also type additional pinyin characters in the middle to help the algorithm, eg typing “adly” gives “阿的理由” (wrong), but “aodly” is enough to get “澳大利亚”.

I tried writing a sentence (我想去買東西) with iOS pinyin keyboard traditional and while I had some luck with the first two letters, it breaks on "wxq" to work again with "wxqm" and then break again. So it's definitely not as good as you market it.

However it could be explained by the fact predictive typing on iOS is quite poor. Often a wrong letter in a word need to be corrected and the next predicted word (and it's conjugation; I'm speaking of French and English input) is often wrong. It may not be noticeable for someone who never used another keyboard, but as a former Windows Phone user the difference is very easy to see. The WP prediction was mind blowing and I could indeed write long sentences in French just by typing a few letter and using one of the prediction candidates.

Ok but you can type wxq<space>mdx which works! Maybe "whole sentence" is overselling it but it definitely works for some pretty long stretches of characters.

But why not just type "aodaliya"? If you have the muscle memory for it already, it seems like abbreviating and still getting the right result would take more time than it was worth. Even on a phone I'm not seeing a win.

Pinyin is really peculiar. It makes it so much easier to learn to outsiders.

I know some overseas Chinese people who (not being raised in China) never learned pinyin and prefer the stroke method. Some of the even prefer drawing the strokes by hand (instead of choosing from the keyboard).

Any Chinese word, I've ever learned, I can only input using pinyin. The stroke method adds so much more mental overhead.

> I know some overseas Chinese people who (not being raised in China) never learned pinyin and prefer the stroke method.

I knew someone who used wubi in preference to pinyin input. She grew up in Guangzhou until age 16, so it wasn't an issue of not learning pinyin. The problem, for her, was that she had no way to know the correct pinyin for a character, since she didn't distinguish between a bunch of sounds that are distinct in pinyin.

> Any Chinese word, I've ever learned, I can only input using pinyin. The stroke method adds so much more mental overhead.

If you were capable of writing by hand, this wouldn't be true.

It's a death spiral though: Computer/mobile input has long since displaced writing by hand for many people, so many of them are no longer fully capable of writing by hand, particularly when it comes to complex and/or rare characters.

Pinyin is the romanization method for Mandarin (aka Putonghua). From your description it sounds like your friend being more comfortable in Cantonese than Mandarin. (Is there really a difference between not fully understanding pinyin and not distinguishing the different sounds?) Anyway these days Cantonese input methods are getting better (or so I heard, my fingers have muscle memory of Changjie by now). See https://jyutping.org/en/keyboard/

> (Is there really a difference between not fully understanding pinyin and not distinguishing the different sounds?)

Yes. They aren't even related ideas. You can easily understand that a distinction exists despite the fact that you, personally, can't hear it. Is there a distinction between not understanding the RGB model and being colorblind?

> From your description it sounds like your friend being more comfortable in Cantonese than Mandarin.

She was fully fluent in Mandarin. Just Cantonese-accented Mandarin. Mandarin is the language of instruction everywhere in China; it isn't possible not to speak it.

Contact list has become the standard - You've probably not even noticed it, but Android's "Gboard" has contacts permissions, and will use your contact's names and nicknames as well as e-mail addresses as suggestions.

I noticed this (albeit with a different keyboard app) as soon as I switched from Windows Phone to Android. Couldn't stand it really, it would auto-suggest random email addresses and even numbers when I was just trying to type words.

The least-bad Android keyboard I've ever used is the HTC keyboard, since it had a setting to only learn words I explicitly told it to remember.

I don't think reading your contact list is that weird. iOS autocorrect in English clearly does it.

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