Mac OS Tiger

[geraldc]

I was playing with the new Mac OS today, they've gone out of their way to be Chinese friendly. There are even more Chinese entry methods, and even the help for Chinese entry methods is in Chinese. They also have traditional to simplified text conversion built into the OS now.

[trevelyan]

How is it at handling the ambiguities when converting from simplified to complex. ie. is the 发 in 头发 and 发展 the same or different? Is the conversion working on the level of individual characters, or have they moved to word-level analysis?

[in_lab]

I'm interested in how well it works too. Because it's included in the OS, I would expect it to be pretty sophisticated. It would be embarrassingly bad if it can't even distinguish the 发 in 头发 and 发展. But as for all the chengyu that contain 发, I don't think there's much chance it will know all of those.

[novemberfog]

How is the pinyin support for Traditional Chinese in Tiger? Has it changed from Panther? The pinyin input method for traditional is really really weak in Panther. I have not had much success using Hanin with roman-based input either. Zhuyin fuhao is fine, but my keyboard is English and thus it is quite difficult to remember which key is which sound. Is there a better solution for Traditional Chinese?

[盤古]

I use Hanin's Pinyin input and find it to meet all my needs. Sure I'd like to have the option to enter compound words a la OS X's SC input but there are advantages of having to enter the tones of each syllable, namely minimizing "typos".

[novemberfog]

Yeah, Hanin does work, but for a slacker like me, I can't always remember the tones. So I spend more time looking up the tones than typing Chinese. I guess that is what I get for trying to learn more than one language at the same time. Maybe I should just buy a zhuyin keyboard from Taiwan...

[盤古]

Yeah, Hanin does work, but for a slacker like me, I can't always remember the tones. So I spend more time looking up the tones than typing Chinese. I guess that is what I get for trying to learn more than one language at the same time. Maybe I should just buy a zhuyin keyboard from Taiwan...

Maybe you can simply buy Zhuyin stickers for your keyboard. I'm sure you can order them online and would cost much less (and less trouble) to buy a Zhuyin keyboard from Taiwan.

BTW, what other languages are you learning?

[novemberfog]

Stickers, good idea!!! I didn't think of that before. It would save a USB port on my iBook too.

Languages--well I am actively using and learning Japanese daily, and in my free time I work on Chinese and Portuguese. I really love Portuguese, it is quite beautiful sounding. I have always wanted to learn a nice sounding language. The goal for it is not fluency though, just would like to understand songs and be able to speak well enough to see Portugal and Brazil one day. Each of these languages has its trouble point: Chinese->tones, Japanese->so many readings for one character, and Portuguese->trying to remember Masc./Fem. for the nouns. By far though, I find tones to be the hardest of all. In fact, I can get quite discouraged at times. But I will save that discussion for another topic.

[盤古]

Well, good luck!

BTW, if you ever do find Zhuyin stickers, please let me know. I'd like to buy some for my father, who unlike my mother, refuse to learn Pinyin

---

Actually I found one

http://www.teksave.com/detail.aspx?ID=1233

[novemberfog]

Good man!

At that price one simply cannot argue.

Good luck with your dad too!

[devi9]

How do you use the Zhuyin stickers?

[盤古]

Depending on which method of Zhuyin input you prefer to use (i.e. Yitian, IBM... etc.) and you open the Keyboard Viewer from the language menu and stick the proper Zhuyin stickers on the keyboard.

[devi9]

I see. Thanks!