Which Chinese input software do you use?

[imron]

Clarification I was referring to wubihua on the phones...

Yes, I agree. Personally, I've found that Wubizixing (for computers) is faster (even for learners), once it has been learnt. Even though sometimes it can feel slower, you don't need to re-read what you've typed to check that the pinyin sentence prediction was correct, which actually makes it faster even if you are typing at quite low speeds (40 cpm).

[gato]

flameproof, the image you linked looks like a Russian cellphone.

[flameproof]

flameproof, the image you linked looks like a Russian cellphone.

Well, it had Wubi on it. But I switched to a better image. Wubi is the red characters on the 1-5 keys.

[gato]

Why a Russian cellphone when you are talking about Chinese input?

[atitarev]

Yeah, nothing Russian about it.

[flameproof]

I changed the image. It was before a Russian phone with Wubi keys.

[guang1015]

I mostly use the ZhuYin, because I think it helps me to remember the traditional stroke and also the tone of every word I've learned. But I sometimes use the pinyin too for convinient purposes only..^^

[renzhe]

Wubi is much faster too (edited: potentially much faster for for PC use for those who know it well - plus yet another good way to "think" actively about characters)

Are you sure about this?

with modern smart pinyin, dictionary-based systems, it will take you 3 keys for most two-character words, and 4 keystroked for most 3-character words. You don't have to type in the full pinyin, just the initials.

Incidentally, I use smart pinyin with SCIM.

[imron]

Actually, in my experience, yes it is faster. Even though sometimes typing in pinyin will "feel" faster, you also have to factor in time spent proof reading the sentences provided by a pinyin based IME. Even if they are really good, like the Google one, you still need to read their output, as they will still make mistakes. Wubi avoids that to a large extent.

A while back, I did a test, timing myself typing over a period of 10 minutes using both methods. Even though the physical act of typing the keys often felt slower when typing with Wubi, due to having to think a bit more before each key press, it actually came out to be faster over time, because I never had to re-read what was being produced.

[ipsi()]

That's really the thing - not having to read it all again should make it a lot faster. I know I read stuff when typing, but you've got to go back and make sure it hasn't changed the beginning of the sentence for some unknown reason.

I'd also like to learn it as it would make typing on my 680 much, much faster. Also, SCIM isn't all that smart, far as I can tell.

[Soupbean]

I'm using SCIM smart pinyin on linux, google pinyin IME on PC and handwriting recognition on my PocketPC

And I'm not sure how well it will run under WINE. On the other hand' date=' it's not exactly hard to download the demo copy...

The software is called 五笔快打, by the way. Thanks to Imron (I think) for pointing it out.[/quote']

i've had 金山打字 (which i think is pretty good for learning wubi) running well under wine before, but you might have to play around with some of the dll's.

[ipsi()]

Did you have to much around with the various encoding schemes or anything? That was the one annoying thing about 五笔快打, it required GB2312 encoding, and that'll be a pain to get working correctly under WINE... So if 金山打字 uses UTF-(8/16) that'd be wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. I'm downloading now, so I guess I'll see how well it works with my current WINE installation soon.

Don't suppose you remember exactly what you had to do to get it to work?

[Soupbean]

I'm not sure about the encoding, but i don't seem to recall having any problems with character encoding. I was running an earlier version of wine and i think that i changed mfc42.dll, msvcp60.dll, riched20.dll and riched32.dll to "native, builtin" in winecfg.

If you have any problems with it you can pm me.

[ipsi()]

Right, I've gotten it working under WINE, and I did need to set GB2312 locale though I'll play around some more to see if that's the best solution.

Some text still doesn't display properly, and it *does not* work with my nice, big, virtual desktop spread over two monitors. I need to turn the external one off, and disable "Let Window Manager Manage Windows" in WINE Config.

It also crashes when I try and create a username, somewhat strangely.

EDIT: Also, probably best to keep the discussion on here, so that everyone can benefit from it.

[imron]

If you have any problems with it you can pm me.

Or, you could continue to discuss it in public, so that future readers who are trying to solve the same problem will also be able to benefit from your wisdom.

EDIT: Beaten to the punch by ipsi()

[Soupbean]

@imron

ok, sorry, i just didn't want to steal the thread (and i also have a distinct lack of wisdom which doesn't help any)

Some text still doesn't display properly

what do you mean? is it showing garbled text or boxes? Can you get other programs to display Chinese characters correctly under wine?

I need to turn the external one off, and disable "Let Window Manager Manage Windows" in WINE Config.

sorry, i forgot to mention that i had to disable window management as well, otherwise it looked weird - i don't have two monitors to use unfortunately.

As for the crash when you try to create a user name, is there any useful output if you run wine from the terminal?

If you want i can try and install the program again later on this week (when i've got a bit more time to play around with the computer) and post my findings...

[ipsi()]

A combination of both - some text is garbled, which I would assume to be Gnome trying to display GB2312 text as it only appears on dialog boxes and window titles and suchlike, and some text just doesn't appear, which I would assume to be a font problem, but I could be wrong there.

WineLocale 0.41 - CJK Launcher for Wine (cli)
zh_CN
Using locale file /usr/local/share/wineloc/patches/common/zh_CN.reg ...
Setting up Chinese (Simplified) GB2312 locale ...
fixme:spoolsv:serv_main (0 (nil))
Executing application ...
fixme:ole:OleLoadPictureEx (0xbc26b4,8486,0,{7bf80980-bf32-101a-8bbb-00aa00300cab},x=0,y=0,f=0,0x33fae8), partially implemented.
fixme:ole:OleLoadPictureEx (0xbc26b4,8486,1,{7bf80980-bf32-101a-8bbb-00aa00300cab},x=0,y=0,f=0,0x33fab8), partially implemented.
fixme:ole:OLEPictureImpl_get_hPal unimplemented for type 3. Returning 0 palette.
fixme:ole:OLEPictureImpl_SaveAsFile (0x132260)->(0x142560, 0, (nil)), hacked stub.
fixme:ole:OLEPictureImpl_Render Not quite correct implementation of rendering icons...
fixme:ole:OleLoadPictureEx (0xbc48c4,23566,0,{7bf80980-bf32-101a-8bbb-00aa00300cab},x=0,y=0,f=0,0x33f744), partially implemented.
fixme:ole:OLEPictureImpl_SaveAsFile (0x1c6fa0)->(0x2160e0, 0, (nil)), hacked stub.
fixme:ntdll:find_reg_tz_info Can't find matching timezone information in the registry for bias -720, std (d/m/y): 6/04/2008, dlt (d/m/y): 28/09/2008
fixme:ole:OLEPictureImpl_Render Not quite correct implementation of rendering icons...
fixme:imm:ImmGetDefaultIMEWnd (0x10052 - (nil) 0x12c820 ): semi-stub
wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x00000000 at address (nil) (thread 0018), starting debugger...
err:dbghelp:pe_load_dbg_file -Unable to peruse .DBG file "DLLMSVBVM60.dbg" ("")
Restoring old Wine locale settings

The above is what I get when it crashes on trying to play around with the User-Name stuff, from program start to end. Assuming 登录 is create?

It does run without Locale changes, but some of the text just appears as ?'s. It is however possible to use it.

[Manuel]

Pinyin-input methods are popular because they are the easiest to master: If you can speak Chinese and you can type, you can almost automatically type Chinese. However, as Imron said, a lot of time is wasted checking for errors or looking for the character you are trying to type. Pinyin-based input would be much better if users could optionally provide tone information to disambiguate, which as far as I know is not possible with either Google Pinyin or Sogou Pinyin (although I'd very much love to be proved wrong!). Interestingly I met a deaf Chinese person who two days ago who could lip-read and she could understand almost everything in the absence of tones, probably because humans are better than computers at understanding context.

Esentially Chinese characters and computers do not mix. Computationally Chinese characters are extremely inefficient, requiring more memory, more CPU cycles and higher-resolution displays. That's why software code is written using ASCII characters, and early mobile phones in China could only display alphanumerical characters.