Moving away from Pinyin to Dayi/Wubi/Cangjie -- which one?

[karakorum]

Hi,

I would like to begin studying one of these "character building" input methods, I believe it would help me with my hand writing and char recognition, as I would be forced to know the characters before I can type them.

My HongKong friends use Cangjie, a taiwanese friend uses Dayi (and swears by it), and wubi is the default for the professional typists.

I am looking for some help and resources to choose between these 3 (and all the others) input methods, I tried to research on wikipedia but the fact of the matter is that I am unable to make any kind of informed decision. Which one do you think I should focus on, and why?

Thanks!

[imron]

Will you be typing mostly in Traditional or Simplified?  The answer to this will inform your decision because although these days it's possible to type in either Traditional or Simplified with these methods, the different systems were created with one set in mind, and it affects how easy it is to type.

 

So, if you want to mostly type simplified then learn Wubi.  If you want to mostly type traditional then then learn Cangjie or Dayi (don't have any experience with the latter).

[Shelley]

18 hours ago, karakorum said:

I believe it would help me with my hand writing and char recognition,

 

I would like to suggest that if you want to improve your handwriting, that you write by hand. Flippant as this may sound, I mean it sincerely.

 

Use a pen and a piece of paper and write characters. Practice copying out paragraphs from a text book at your level if you can't face pages and pages of writing the same characters over and over again, although this is very useful in the long term as it helps build muscle memory which is very helpful.

 

Try using Hanzi Grids available from imron and there is a link in his post above. It is free but for a modest sum you can get the full version and unlock some excellent features.

 

If you really can't bring yourself to putting pen to paper try Tofu Learn here https://www.tofulearn.com/

 

This is also free and is very good. 

 

 

[karakorum]

@imron That's a good point, and a potential problem since I use both simplified and traditional ... I think I might lean towards traditional tho, simply for the historical aspect of it. Thanks for the tip

 

@Shelley Yes of course, nothing beats practice writing to improve writing, it's just that in real life 95% of my chinese character output is from a keyboard.., so I thought that I could try to get some use out of it. The main difficulty of writing for me being remembering character composition. It took me literally years to be able to write stuff like 援 授  without having to pause for 5 second to think about which is which. Thanks for the resources tho, I think I might try to fit in some writing practice for like only 10 minutes, but every day.

[Shelley]

1 hour ago, karakorum said:

only 10 minutes, but every day.

 

Every day is the important part  Hope it goes well.