How do people write on a PC in China?

[mulans]

Hi there,

Do people in China type in pinyin and it gets changed to hanzi to write on a keyboard or do they use something else?

Thank you.

[renzhe]

Most of them do it using pinyin, yes.

There are also other methods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers

[mulans]

Thank you very much.

[liuzhou]

Here is a brief explanation I put together a while back.

[mulans]

Thank you.

I heard you needed Windows 7 ultimate or better to get pinyin character input, but it seems to work just fine on windows 7 home premium English edition.

[Demonic_Duck]

The computers at work are very old and running XP and have no problems inputting characters using pinyin. I'm pretty sure pinyin input has basically been around as long as personal computing has existed in China, or am I wrong?

[liuzhou]

heard you needed Windows 7 ultimate or better to get pinyin character input

You heard wrong. I've been using pinyin input since long before Windows XP

It works in all versions. yes. Even Windows 3!

or am I wrong?

No.

[AucklandLove]

I saw a Chinese student use a pen to write characters on a mouse pad at the library the other day. Looked very beautiful, but not very efficient. Is this a popular method for Chinese input? Pinyin seems to make a lot more sense to me.

[abcdefg]

#8 --

I saw a Chinese student use a pen to write characters on a mouse pad at the library the other day. Looked very beautiful, but not very efficient. Is this a popular method for Chinese input?

This is mostly done by older Chinese who didn't learn Pinyin as kids in school.

[bragsk]

in older portable devices, it's usually more straightforward to write the characters one by one, because its pinyin input system is crappy that you have to spend a lot of time to choose a character from a large list. Nowadays, pinyin input system is much smarter and efficient, because it can recognise words or even phrase instead of just single characters.

[iamlegend]

Most use pinyin. My father does at least. My mother likes to use the handwriting software. It's just preference. I think typically as a user gets more used to typing though, they will switch to pinyin and drop the handwriting altogether.

[skylee]

This is mostly done by older Chinese who didn't learn Pinyin as kids in school.

Or people who use Chinese but do not use any kind of phonetic-based system. Many people in HK using smartphones input Chinese by using their fingers to write on the screen, which is similar to using a stylus to write on an input pad. They are not necessarily older people.

But I agree that this is not an efficient input method in terms of input speed. But as native Chinese users need not learn anything to use this input method, it can be considered efficent in terms of learning time.

[Matty]

The most popular I've seen, and I mean almost 100% of cases I've encountered, people use Sougou IME

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogou_Pinyin

Sogou Site: http://pinyin.sogou.com/

Most use it on both PC and Android phones, though I prefer Swype for Android.