Wu Bi Study Sheet

[sparrow]

So, I decided to learn Wubi. I know, I'm a masochist. Here's how:

 

Introduction

For those who don't know, Wubi is a method for typing Chinese characters. Basically, you enter characters by radical. Each letter on the keyboard is associated with a group of radicals, which are classified in a certain way. The benefit is that typing in Chinese becomes much faster as the vast majority of characters can be typed by at most 4 key strokes, plus spacebar to confirm.

 

If you're familiar with Pinyin Input, you know how obnoxious it can be to hunt for the correct number of the character you want to write. Because typing with Wubi specifies precisely the character you desire, typing is much faster.

 

The problem is that Wubi has a somewhat steep learning curve because you have to memorize which keys are associated with which radicals...

 

Wubi Rules

Princeton's Overview

 

Practice Text

For practice text, I'm using the vocabulary list from Routledge's A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese. I'm sure they won't mind if I share a little bit of the dictionary with you for the sake of practice—plus, these words are freely available in the first two or three HSK vocab lists. [After thinking about it, I'm going to mix up the order in the file to protect Routledge's frequency ordering.]

 

The attached file is the 300 most frequent Chinese words. Each line of the text file contains 30 of these. Practice typing each line until you can type fairly quickly. After that, you're on your own, but it should give you a good foundation in Wubi.

 

Download the attached text file. Let it be the template and make a copy for you to write in, that you can delete when you want a clear slate.

 

As you practice, I recommend you keep this chart on your screen.

 

Since I've just begun learning Wubi, this method is theoretical. But I will try it out and let everyone know, and hopefully it will help others learn Wubi fairly quickly.

 

 

Sparrow

 

 

Edit: Later, I'll add a link to a spreadsheet with the key combinations for each character.

wu bi practice template - chineseforum.txt

[sparrow]

[Reserved for key combinations post.]

[imron]

The best way to learn Wubi is with a typing tutor program. Kingsoft make one as do a few others. A search of the forums will return a number of threads on the topic.

[jiminchina]

So how is the learning going? I had thought about having a go at learning wubi, but it sounded horribly difficult. Most Chinese do not seem to know it. How are you getting along?

[imron]

Many Chinese people have a warped idea about how difficult Wubi is to learn because they will have learnt it a little bit at school, but will have been taught it from a book and have been required to memorise the codes straight from a book.  When taught like that, it is horribly difficult, but you shouldn't learn Wubi by memorising codes from a book, you should learn it by practice.

 

That way you don't really have to memorise codes, after time, your fingers just know where to go to type the correct thing and you do it without thinking - just like you would do if you touch type in English.  If I want to type 'hi' I don't have to physically think right index finger moves across to type 'h', right middle finger moves up to type 'i'.  My fingers just know the correct place to go.  The same thing happens after regular practice with Wubi - you don't think about codes, you just think where your fingers need to go to add the next shape.

 

So read up a little bit about the theory of Wubi, and then download a typing tutor program and practice, practice practice.  You can download TypeEasy from Kingsoft here.

 

Note, if you don't already know more than 1,000-1,500 characters, Wubi will be harder to learn - but still not that difficult.  You'll just be practicing typing things you don't know the meaning or pronunciation of.

[querido]

1) For something very easy but slow try wubihua (this is built into my ipad).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubihua_method

2) This site linked by Altair seems to work well as an online wubi tutor:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/34077-wubi-code-lookup/#comment-257486

Does a site like that exist for Cangjie?