Should I learn Zhuyin and Taiwan's typing input method

[PerpetualChange]

I prefer traditional characters and most of my interactions with Chinese people are also based on traditional characters. However, I learned pinyin first, and that has been my go-to ever since I started. Is there an advantage to divorcing my study from pinyin and diving into what people who use traditional characters would generally use instead? 

[Lu]

Learn Zhuyin and typing in Zhuyin if that is of practical use to you. For example, you found a textbook you like to use and it's in Zhuyin; you're staying in Taiwan and typing on a local keyboard; you found a good teacher but she only knows Zhuyin, no Pinyin. Or if you are a transcription nerd and want to collect them all. In other cases, I'd say don't worry about it.

 

If you know Pinyin, Zhuyin is not very difficult though. You spend an hour familiarising yourself with the system and learn the rest by trial & error on a Taiwanese keyboard. And then finalise your learning by looking up how on earth to spell 雄.

[Flickserve]

Interesting question.

 

I type pinyin into my whatsapp to get traditional characters when I need to and then message away

[薛丽]

Traditional is first introduced to me as my tutor is more familiar with it and according to her, Zhuyin  is much easier to learn and very handy.  But when I enrolled in Confucius institute, we use simplified and Pinyin. I agreed with Lu, it depends on where you decide to use it.  Zhuyin is widely use in Taiwan were as Pinyin in mainland China.  However I still find Zhuyin very handy.

 

I hope it helps

[calibre2001]

11 hours ago, PerpetualChange said:

I prefer traditional characters and most of my interactions with Chinese people are also based on traditional characters. However, I learned pinyin first, and that has been my go-to ever since I started. Is there an advantage to divorcing my study from pinyin and diving into what people who use traditional characters would generally use instead? 

 

One other advantage (but increasingly less so) of zhuyin is one needs to input the correct tone for the required character to show up. So the user has to know his/her tones properly.

 

I've been using pinyin + traditional characters for many years now. It's just a matter of tweaking keyboard settings to display traditional characters. The best of both worlds in my opinion.

[Perpetual Chang]

@calibre2001why is that "increasingly less so" an advantage?

[calibre2001]

Perhaps not the most accurate choice of words.

 

Without knowing the right tone, one can still do trial and error to find the required character from the list of characters.