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The pendulum already turned back. The current generation under 20 grew up with touchscreens. That obseletes input with pinyin; many don't care if the device has

The pendulum already turned back. The current generation under 20 grew up with touchscreens. That obseletes input with pinyin; many don't care if the device has no keyboard.

thenthenthen 1y ago
Input is so interesting in China, basically a sorta t9 but just single letters and picking the right characters, with common/frequently used characters first, using pinyin. For example to say “ How are you?” You just type “nhm” (Ni Hao Ma) and 你好吗 shows up as suggestion/autofill. You can make surprisingly long sentences using this method.
olalonde 1y ago
> That obseletes input with pinyin Uh? Pinyin input is by far the most popular input technique in China. I rarely see anyone using handwriting input. That being said, it has nothing to do with English winning. It's just a Chinese input technique that uses the latin alphabet. English fluency in China is not very common, especially spoken English.
- eru 1y ago
  Just like German is written with almost the same alphabet as English, but that doesn't give you English fluency.
- syndeo 1y ago
  My father-in-law here in China uses handwriting input, but everyone else I've seen here uses Pinyin, and it's totally fast and natural for them. And very true about the English. With some exceptions (of course), folks here maybe know a handful of words at best, and even then, pronunciation is usually pretty rough. People here really aren't using it; they are perfectly comfortable with their Chinese, and why wouldn't they be? Anyone saying otherwise clearly hasn't been here to see it firsthand.
pertymcpert 1y ago
What? Only people I've seen use the writing input mode was old people.
anticensor 1y ago
If only Unicode decomposed Chinese characters on a per basic stroke basis: it would be so much easier to have keyboards following that.
- ezst 1y ago
  This has nothing to do with Unicode and everything to do with input methods, of which there are a variety. Some methods are indeed shape-based like you suggest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_method#Shape-based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_method#Shape-bas... By the looks of it, Pinyin (a phonetic one) won by a landslide, which I suspect this is the result of a long effort by the Chinese government to install Mandarin as the official language of China, above regional dialects (different regions would write similar characters but pronounce them differently, and defaulting to Pinyin has this "nice" effect of having people "think of how it would be pronounced in Mandarin first", even when the result are characters that would be read by a Cantonese speaker).

The pendulum already turned back. The current generation under 20 grew up with touchscreens. That obseletes input with pinyin; many don't care if the device has no keyboard.

thenthenthen 1y ago

Input is so interesting in China, basically a sorta t9 but just single letters and picking the right characters, with common/frequently used characters first, using pinyin. For example to say “ How are you?” You just type “nhm” (Ni Hao Ma) and 你好吗 shows up as suggestion/autofill. You can make surprisingly long sentences using this method.

olalonde 1y ago

> That obseletes input with pinyin Uh? Pinyin input is by far the most popular input technique in China. I rarely see anyone using handwriting input. That being said, it has nothing to do with English winning. It's just a Chinese input technique that uses the latin alphabet. English fluency in China is not very common, especially spoken English.

eru 1y ago
Just like German is written with almost the same alphabet as English, but that doesn't give you English fluency.
syndeo 1y ago
My father-in-law here in China uses handwriting input, but everyone else I've seen here uses Pinyin, and it's totally fast and natural for them. And very true about the English. With some exceptions (of course), folks here maybe know a handful of words at best, and even then, pronunciation is usually pretty rough. People here really aren't using it; they are perfectly comfortable with their Chinese, and why wouldn't they be? Anyone saying otherwise clearly hasn't been here to see it firsthand.

pertymcpert 1y ago

What? Only people I've seen use the writing input mode was old people.

anticensor 1y ago

If only Unicode decomposed Chinese characters on a per basic stroke basis: it would be so much easier to have keyboards following that.

ezst 1y ago
This has nothing to do with Unicode and everything to do with input methods, of which there are a variety. Some methods are indeed shape-based like you suggest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_method#Shape-based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_method#Shape-bas... By the looks of it, Pinyin (a phonetic one) won by a landslide, which I suspect this is the result of a long effort by the Chinese government to install Mandarin as the official language of China, above regional dialects (different regions would write similar characters but pronounce them differently, and defaulting to Pinyin has this "nice" effect of having people "think of how it would be pronounced in Mandarin first", even when the result are characters that would be read by a Cantonese speaker).