Microsoft's IME . . .

[roddy]

Does anyone else find Microsofts IME a little strange at times? I mean, it's by far and away the easiest system to use, as far as I know, but sometimes it seems to do odd things.

Like just now, I wanted to type 他说- as I typed ta the pop-up bar gave me 她, but as soon as I added 说 it changed to 他说. Why would it do that? I don't think I've used 她 all that often lately.

I also find the ordering of the characters strange sometimes. It does seem to remember what you've typed recently, but why when I type shi is 湿 listed before 是. I don't recall using 湿 more often than 是。 And now I've typed 是 it's coming up as number one, but 湿 has moved all the way back to no.7.

Another feature I would love to see is for it to automatically realise when I am not typing pinyin and turn itself off - if I forget it's on and start typing 'Dear Sir / Madam' I get 德阿日 and have to delete it all the way back and start again - surely it shouldn't be too hard to have it figure out if someone is typing pinyin or English.

Are you listening, Bill?

Roddy

[889]

If you're not happy with what you're getting, you can change the settings. They're a little hard to find: when CH is showing, click on Show the Language Bar, then click on the symbol with a small arrow in the lower right, then click on Properties.

I'm not sure what all the options there do, but if you're unhappy with what you're getting you can try checking and unchecking a few boxes. If IME's consistently getting something wrong, you can also set up a User-Defined Phrase.

[perjp]

Somehow I don't think the pinyin IME is a priority for MS. Japanese

users get a very nice and sophisticated IME, but Chinese users

are stuck with this rather crappy one that doesn't do a very good

job at guessing the correct characters.

I find that Chinese Star's (http://www.cstar.com.cn) intelligent

pinyin does a far better job at guessing characters correctly, and

also provides a nicer interface.

Also, Zhineng Pinyin (don't have a link) seems to be very popular

in internet cafe's here. It works quite differently from the standard

MS IME though, so it's probably not to everyone's taste, and it takes

a while to get used to.

Both these cost money though, but that's a very relative term if

you're in China

[ChouDoufu]

has anyone tried other IME besides the MS Pinyin? I hate how its default is the shift key to switch between chinese and english. has anyone tried quanpin ? any thoughts on it? I've noticed some other IME's on the CHinese version of windows that seem to be better than MS-Pinyin. any ideas on how i can install them on my system(english windowsXP)?

[trevelyan]

Anyone else find that it goes into "unresponsive" mode sometimes, and no amount of banging the keyboard gets it back without manually clicking on the icon?

[Howard]

I find it annoying that the IME you get set as default in the Windows XP Simplified Chinese edition is not available in the English edition

[Zingaro]

I find the MS IME adequate for my uses - actually more than adequate. As my Hanyu reading abilities improve, I think it will be more useful.

Roddy: I'm afraid you must remember to switch between EN and CH within a given application. But, if you switch, say, from Word to Excel, the IME defaults back to English until you say otherwise.

I haven't played around with the Chinese version of XP's IME, although I understand that there are some input methods not available in the English XP IME. In fact, my friends in China typically use the WuBi input method. A friend in China gave me some software that allowed me to add this input method to my English XP system. So, I now have WuBi as part of my XP IME. My friends in China can use it on my laptop as they normally do on their Chinese systems. And I will, one day, use it myself as my reading/writing skills improve.

For now, the Pinyin input helps me to learn more Chinese as I use it.

As for other IMEs (ChouDoufu): Before I upgraded to Win XP, I used NJStar's IME. I think they call the complete package "NJ Star Communicator" because it has a built-in email client and server. (They also have a complete Chinese word processor similar to MS Word.) This usually worked pretty well with both Win98 and Win 2000, although it didn't work with some of the MS Office programs very well under those OS's. The core character translation in earlier Windows versions just wasn't equipped to handle decoding Chinese characters for on screen display.

To switch between EN and CH on my Win XP system, I set the keyboard shortcut to SHIFT+CTRL. This allows for fewer mistakes than using the default IME settings.

Also: I recommend that you always display the language bar when using the IME. This allows a number a different options (and more information) not readily available when not using the language bar.

[Zingaro]

Roddy - I set the keyboard shortcut in Win XP to "SHIFT+ALT", not SHIFT+CRL as I said in my previouis message. I seldom accidentally shift to Chinese input this way.

[Pravit]

In addition to switching manually from CH to EN, you can also click on the little 中, which will become a 英 and allow you to type in English. I personally find it faster just to do CTRL-SHIFT-1, which I have bound to English.

[Chappie]

NJstar is using a "soft" input of characters.

When you do it with MS IME its "hard" input of characters.

I have test it before. When I want to translate stuff in babelfish.altavista.com

i cant translate with NJStar produced char. But with windows I can.

Btw there are many IME for chinese. Most goods ones arent from MS.