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Comment by nojs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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