Courses on Chinese Input you've heard of

[RichardVV]

Are there any courses that teach chinese input that you have seen/attended/heard of?

After some thought I realized I still want to learn Canjie ... while learning PinYin as Primary of course. Heard of any courses or seminars or lessons or anything online or offline that teach Canjie? Please, anything you have heard of, I'll digg into even just rumours. Courses on any other input methods would be great too since I want to do a project about Chinese input. Thanks.

[Senzhi]

In my school, as part of their graduation in Foreign Trade, students do have the requirement of being able to type Chinese blindly at a set speed (not sure how many characters/minute though).

They usually practice this extensively in MS Word during computer class, with the standard MS IME input method on Windows 98. I fell upon this when I realised some of my students were not able to create, send and/or reply to an email. I was wondering what they then learned during computer class. Well ... the above was the answer.

[RichardVV]

is your school in China, or the US EUP or other country?

[foodtarget]

I don't know about books or courses, but if you do a google search for Cangjie, you'll get a lot of pages about the input method. This one was one of the first ones that popped up for me, and it seems to give a pretty lengthy explanation of typing in Cangjie.

Most actual courses/books on Cangjie are probably in Chinese, which makes sense since it seems rather pointless to learn Chinese typing if you don't know Chinese. Richard, didn't you say in another thread that you're a beginner learning Chinese? If you want to learn Cangjie, I think it might be easier to wait until you have learned a fair amount of Chinese (especially becoming familiar with the characters), but that is just my opinion.

[imron]

I agree. Learning a shape-based character method before you have learned a reasonable number of characters will be much more difficult. As for pinyin, there's nothing really to learn. You just type the pinyin and the characters appear. Obviously you need to know the pinyin of the character before you can type it, but for that you can just take an ordinary Chinese course, not one specific to Chinese Input.

You might also be interested in this page which has a break down of various different input methods.

Anyway, although in China I'm sure there are plenty of training courses available for people wanting to learn to type in Chinese, I think you would find that for those courses, all instruction and materials would be given in Chinese.

[Senzhi]

is your school in China, or the US EUP or other country?

I'm in Shantou, Guangdong. If you need more specific details, PM me.

[RichardVV]

Does anyone use supporting software for typing chinese? Such as dictionaries or grammer checkers or software that can find out keying methods?

[RichardVV]

Just wondering how other people learnt to input chinese.

[Don_Horhe]

I'm using the standard Windows IME.

[mikevwilliams]

I'm using the Sogou Pinyin IME. It's very good, I like it better than the standard Windows Chinese IME.

[roddy]

Merging two similar topics - Richard, you've started four topics in the last week or so on input methods or very closely related topics. Might be better to keep them all in once place.

[foodtarget]

I'm using the Google Pinyin IME, it's very cool. You can type traditional and simplified with pinyin. Do other pinyin IMEs let you type in traditional, or are some of them limited to simplified?

[imron]

Almost any modern Chinese IME will allow you to type both Traditional and Simplified.