Fastest Traditional Chinese Input Methods

[seulggie]

Finally decided to create an account after all these years of hearing about you guys

What's the fastest way to type Traditional Chinese? I'm talking about record-breaking fast. Looking over the Interwebs and the threads in this forum, I know of Cangjie-3 and 5 (倉頡), Wubizixing (五笔字型), Boshiamy (嘸蝦米), and from this post, Erbi (二笔).

The general feeling I get from the threads I've read here is that 五笔字型 is most preferred for the "I wanna type faster than with pinyin" folks but this thread's:

Traditional character support in Wubi is still somewhat lacking.

makes me want to look at other input methods.

I know Cangjie takes a bunch of effort to learn but I'm the type of guy who's willing to be inefficient and learn esoteric junk (and that's why I use Dvorak). However, I figured I better get some advice before I spent many moons in confusion at character codes.

I've only had a year of Chinese study at uni so my head a-splodes whenever I try to read about Chinese input methods in Chinese (oh the irony..), hence my dearth of information I have on Boshiamy and Erbi and subsequent trip to the lovely folks at Chinese-forums.

aaand I'm on a Mac.

Thanks!

[外国赤佬]

A pinyin IME with a good dictionary (i.e. any modern pinyin IME like Sogou, Baidu, Google, etc) is already very fast. I don't think there's any need to go even faster unless you're a professional typist.

[skylee]

I use Google Pinyin on my PC, and Google Pinyin and Cantonese Keyboard on my android phone (this is because the android version of Google Pinyin can't produce some Cantonese specific characters). With Google Pinyin you will also have the option to input by stroke order. It is very easy and requires almost no learning as long as you know how to write a word. It's good for writing words you don't know how to pronounce.

There are of course also handwriting input methods but they are relatively slow. They are good if you would like more practice to help you learn handwriting, though.

[seulggie]

Humor me for a bit then.

Which input method is most recommended for professional typists who deal mainly with Traditional Chinese, and why so?

[skylee]

I guess you will have to wait for a professional typist's reply (are there still people who do typing as a profession?). Good luck.

[gato]

Wrong forum if you are looking to hear from a professional typist (or even people know much about professional typists).

[seulggie]

Anyone familiar with any of the 3 input methods I mentioned in my first post will do. I just wanted some helpful response besides "yo, use pinyin. it's fast enough".

[imron]

are there still people who do typing as a profession?

Court reporters?

Of the input methods listed in your first post, I'm only really familiar with Wubi, and I can confirm that although modern versions do allow you to type in Traditional characters, the support is not so great, and often the Traditional variants will appear after double or triple character simplified combinations that have the same key sequence, therefore requiring selection (which slows typing down).

For example, say I wanted to type the character 龍. If I type in the Wubi sequence for this (uegd), I get the following choices:

1 前天 2 疽 3 礱 4 龍

With 前天 being the default if I just keep typing.

The system was not originally designed with Traditional characters in mind, and so the introduction of Traditional character shapes introduces a number of conflicts.

[gato]

Imron is the resident Wubi expert, though I believe Wubi is designed for simplified Chinese and doesn't work as well for traditional characters.

Cangjie is mostly used in HK. Skylee is one of the few HK posters here. She has mentioned before she thought Cangjie was too complicated and never learned it.

[imron]

The other thing I'll add, is that Macs have pretty bad support for IMEs compared to Windows, meaning that while it might be easy to find a good IME for an obscure input method on Windows, finding an equivalent on OSX may not be so easy. For example, it's only been in the last couple of years that decent Wubi IMEs started to come out, despite the fact that the method has been around for almost 30 years.

I can't speak for the speed of Cangjie, but unlike Wubi, it's designed for Traditional characters. Even if it's not faster than pinyin, as a learner of Chinese, I believe you get great benefit from using a shape based IME because it teaches you to break down characters into their component parts and also requires you to be able to actively recall what a character looks like, rather than pinyin/pronunciation based IMEs which rely only on passive recall.

[seulggie]

Thanks for the responses, everyone. I'm going to continue learning Cangjie (倉頡) and figure out whether it's Cangjie 3 or Cangjie 5 that comes with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Boshiamy (嘸蝦米) is very intriguing but that's something I'll get to a couple years down the line.

[floatingmoon]

It also depends what kind of input methods windows provide too. There is a method named 九方格，but I dunno if window provides it, nor if Chinese version window provides it.

The 九方格 I am talking about it's regarding the shape of the character, not the 注音 type。

Are you learning traditional Chinese writing, or simplifiied?

[skylee]

I guess you meant 九方？ It is similar to the stroke input method used by mobile phones but I think it will require a bit of learning and practice. The stroke input method in mobile phones is strightforward. The only trick is that you will need to follow Taiwan's official stroke order. Before smartphones many HK people type on mobiles using stroke order input method. Some could type quite fast.

[Takeshi]

I use Cangjie. (Though I use it mainly to type Simplified.) Well, I'm sorta still learning, but I use it as my main input method.

Cangjie is actually not thaaat hard to learn. I have tried to learn it a long time ago and gave up (I was much worse at Chinese then), but recently I tried again about a month ago and for the most part succeeded. I think I can type about 90%ish of the characters I need to use, and ever so often I need to look up a new character's code in a dictionary or something so I still have pinyin on backup. Also according to my friend (on IM chat), I now type faster than before when I used pinyin, so I've gotten somewhere. (Though I talk to her in Cantonese, which is probably why.)

The main reason I switched to Cangjie is because of Cantonese. I generally think in Cantonese, and I often type in Vernacular Cantonese so it is a pain for me to use pinyin because I need to convert the Cantonese sounds in my head to Mandarin in order to type. There is pretty much no other alternative, so I had a pretty big necessity to learn Cangjie and that's a part of why I was able to succeed this time I think. I decided to make the switch because I found it sad that I was a faster typer on my phone (using a stroke input method) than on a computer using pinyin; so I figured I needed a geometric style IME for my computer too.

(My pinyin IME, ibus, is pretty damn good though; it either supports Cantonese phrases out of the box, or has gotten used to me typing them and automatically added them to the dictionary because it can type Cantonese phrases very well. The backside is that you have to know what the characters Mandarin readings are.)

Cangjie has good points and bad points.

If you use Dvorak, you will be able to clearly notice the appalling lack of ergonomics in Cangjie. It is very uncomfortable to type, with keys going all over the place and very often it is like you're playing twister with your fingers. It's so bad that I type the B key with a different hand depending on position of recent keys typed.

Also, the codes for the characters assume the Taiwanese Standard for character shapes. (eg: you get the code for 所 by assuming the left part is 戶, not 户 or 戸) If you are Taiwanese, this is probably a good thing, but if you are used to the Mainland or Hong Kong Standards, this might be a little confusing/annoying for you.

Another annoying thing is that there are quite a few common characters that conflict. (Though this is probably because I type Simplified.)

The good points is that it is widely available. The main reason I decided to use Canjie over Boshiamy and other "better" IMEs is that Cangjie simply has a much higher market penetration and will work by default on almost any computer without needing to buy any software. Also it is extremely popular in HK, so I figure it must work well for Cantonese, which is my main reason for switching.

I guess it is fairly fast, but I wouldn't know if it is faster than say 双拼 with a good IME for typing Mandarin. Either way, even if it is fast, I wouldn't want to try breakneck speeds with it because I imagine it would be very painful on the fingers, so I generally type at an average relaxed pace. In general it is still faster than pinyin because it inputs directly and you don't have to pick from a list.

[skylee]

Just to clarify that there is not a causal relationship between speaking in Cantonese and using Cangjie. Haha. Cantonese is my first language but I type in Pinyin mostly. Other cantonese-speakers I know either use handwriting input or Cantonese input, if they can't use Cangjie. Or they type in English.

[gato]

I love 双拼. Have used it for about 6 years now.

[seulggie]

Hi floatingmoon, I'm sorta learning both but I'm focusing on Traditional.

Hooray, someone who uses Cangjie! Takeshi, what you've said makes sense and corresponds with what I've felt about Cangjie. Sad to hear it's like Twister for you fingers 'cause I'd much prefer it to be comfortable. But hey, you can't win 'em all. The widespread availability of Cangjie is mainly why I'm learning it as opposed to learning Boshiamy. I'm curious though, what other "better" IMEs are you aware of besides Boshiamy?

And gato, is 双拼 similar to Zhuyin (注音)/Bopomofo in that any multi-letter consonant or vowel in pinyin can be entered with one keystroke?

[Takeshi]

skylee: Yes, there is no casual relationship between using Cantonese and Cangjie. Cangjie is "dialect neutral", but pinyin obviously isn't. Cantonese is your first language, but you are probably good at Mandarin if you type in pinyin.

Handwriting input is really slow, and most Cantonese romanization input I know of sucks (and most people aren't used to Cantonese romanization in the first place), so really Cangjie is almost like "the only choice". (Of course there are a few other stroke based methods Cantonese people commonly use like Q9 etc, but again, not very many, and for me it was really "the only choice" because Q9 and stuff are proprietary/not very widely available.)

And I'm not aware of any other "better" IMEs besides Boshiamy, sorry. (Q9 is probably inferior to Boshiamy etc for "typing pros", but it is extremely easy to learn so people like it.)

About 双拼, yes, it is similar to 注音 in that regard, but the main difference is that it is probably better. Most 注音 implementations I know use 4 rows of the keyboard and require you to type in tones. (Yes, there are a few special keyboards that use 3 rows, but I still haven't seen an implementation that doesn't require you to type tones.) I mean it's not that bad, and typing the tones helps a lot with the filtering process, but I think most pinyin methods are more advanced than 注音 methods nowadays.