Typing Roman letters with tone markers on an iphone

[Dawei3]

This post is to both teach and to ask a question. 

 

For those that don’t know, you can type in pinyin on your iphone.  When you need a tone mark, just hold your finger on the vowel and it will offer you that vowel with many different diacritics. 

 

(When a friend showed me this, I thought it was really cool.  And I was amazed that I didn’t realize my iphone would do this - it was so obvious!  I type friend’s names in pinyin next to their characters when I add them to Wechat and my phone contacts.)

 

HOWEVER, I can’t figure out how to type a 3^rd tone.  My solution is to use an “upside down” 3^rd tone, i.e., â ê ô î   because that’s all Apple offers.  I’d rather use the correctly displayed tone.  Has anyone figured out how to do this?  How can you type a 3^rd tone while WITHIN Wechat on an iphone? 

 

(The tone is only for my use, so the fact that it’s upside down really isn’t a problem - and if I really want it displayed correctly, I can always generate it with google translate and copy it into Wechat.  I just wondered if there is a quicker more direct way.  I'd like to be able to type a 3^rd tone pinyin while in Wechat or while adding contacts).    

[mikelove]

You can actually use the built-in iOS pinyin IME to enter tone marks - just long press the keyboard key for the vowel (use v for ü) and you’ll see all four tones as options above it. Once you enter a tone, iOS will stop trying to recognize what you entered as something to translate into characters and will interpret everything as straight pinyin.

 

(This does not work in the regular English keyboard, where the third tone is not shown as an option and you don’t get any extra mark choices for ü, but it does work with pinyin)

[Dawei3]

Mike Thanks!  Exactly what I wanted!  I love my iphone for learning Chinese ?

[imron]

I made a keyboard extension for iOS that makes it easy to type pinyin with tones: https://www.pinyinput.net/ios