Sogou releases Wubi IME

Sogou has just released a Wubi IME. I just had a quick play with it then. One feature that seems nice is the mixed pinyin functionality. You can type the pinyin pronunciation of a character and matching characters will appear in the candidate window with the Wubi code next to them (making it easy to learn the code for the characters you can't figure out). It doesn't seem to have quite as good support for traditional as Freewb, e.g. by default it doesn't seem to support either 醫 or 學 using Wubi unless you switch to traditional mode and then type them using the same codes you would use for simplified versions. This is obviously less than ideal for people wanting to use Wubi with traditional characters. It's also missing lots of fairly common character combinations for phrases such as 你好，但是 etc. It does have the ability to import word/character databases though, so perhaps things will improve before too long.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how this develops, but for the meantime, I think Freewb is still the better Wubi input method.

The mixed pinyin function seems like a really great feature for us wubi newbies (woobies? ), but I can see how I might get used to typing the tricky characters in pinyin instead of learning the wubi codes, which again would be counter-productive... Just to add to the list of wubi IMEs, a friend of mine recommended 小鸭五笔, a really neat, small and non-intrusive wubi IME (once you disable the sound alerts ）

By the way, perhaps it's about time to update the 五笔 section in the computer input wiki?

Done.

I've asked my GF for an explanation on Wubi and she had this frustrated look on her face when trying to explain how it works to me. What I got was that it takes a lot of memorization, and you need to know how to separate characters into their radicals and should know how to write. So do the benefits of learning Wubi outweigh the costs?

Edited September 1, 2008 at 01:52 PM by ABCinChina

IMO, the short answer to your question is yes. The long answer can be found by reading all these posts

Also have a read of this English explanation of how wubi works here, and if you want to practice, download 五笔快打 from this page.

In addition, don't listen to advice saying you shouldn't bother to learn Wubi from any Chinese person who doesn't actually know how to type using this system (for the same reason you shouldn't listen to people who can't touch-type tell you that it's not necessary to learn touch-typing). Also don't listen to any Chinese person who says Wubi is too hard for foreigners to understand.

What I got was that it takes a lot of memorization,

Learning Wubi doesn't require memorisation (and don't listen to people who tell you it does), but it does require regular practice. Many Chinese try to learn Wubi (or are made to learn Wubi for a week or two in school) by memorising the key codes for each character. IMO this is just a pointless waste of time. I've not memorised Wubi key codes, or the Wubi key layout, just like I never sat down and memorised the qwerty keyboard layout. However I still know where all the keys are, and I can still figure out how to type an unknown character, because I've practiced it enough.

and you need to know how to separate characters into their radicals and should know how to write.

This is true, and I would argue that both of these skills are worth having. If you don't have such skills, you will gain them through learning and using Wubi. Edited September 2, 2008 at 12:41 AM by imron

I have just started learning wubi, and I would definitely say that it seems like it will pay off in the long run. Yes, it does take a lot of effort to learn the radical placements and the correct breakdown for some of the tricky characters, but what doesn't require a bit of "roll up the sleeves" attitude? I am sure happy I put some effort into learning how to read and write both Norwegian and English, to keep my balance on a bicycle and understand the principles of generalized vector spaces, all of which took a lot of effort at the stage in life I learnt them. Few valuable skills are "handed to to you for free."

Having to recall characters actively (not the passive look-recognize type of recalling) seems like a very good process to learn for a beginning Chinese student (or any Chinese user for that matter). I have also grown tired of scrolling through lists of homophones to find the one character/word I want when using pinyin-input, and I am motivated by the typing speeds you can reach through wubi.