[deleted]
A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
61–70 of 77 posts
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pinyin may dominate in Mainland China, but places like Taiwan and Hong Kong still prefer their own input methods. Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified characters and HK's Cantonese has an underused pinyin equivalent, but that isn't a cause. Other systems became prevalent first, and stuck.
Taiwan's Zhuyin is 90+% the same as Pinyin except the input is composed with Chinese script radicals (like hiragana) rather than Latin script. > Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified That doesn't impact the human side of the IME. It's just different output for the same input. And the input (Mandarin pronunciation) is the same for mainland and Taiwan.
> Taiwan's Zhuyin is 90+% the same as Pinyin except the input is composed with Chinese script radicals
I wouldn't say that's true. It's phonetic, sure, but it relates much more closely to the syllable structure than Pinyin does.
Simple example: 南, Pinyin: nán, Zhuyin: ㄋㄢˊ
In Pinyin, we use the same letter "n" in initial and final position. In Zhuyin, the word is composed of two letters, ㄋ （initial n), and ㄢ (final an). The only time that ㄢ begins a syllable is when it's the whole syllable, e.g. 安, ㄢ, "ān"
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zhuyin aren’t Chinese radicals. They are derived from characters. For example the “b” sounds ㄅ comes from the character 包 bāo.
I thought Zhuyin was like kana because it was designed during the Japanese occupation?
Zhuyin was created on the Mainland during the ROC era, and brought to Taiwan after the Japanese surrender, where it is now the most prominent phonetic system. Prior to the KMT retreat to Taiwan, Mandarin was not widely spoken here. Before Japan colonized Taiwan, Taiwanese language (Minnan) was usually written using Latin characters with diacritics. During the Japanese colonial era, they attempted to introduce Taiwanese kana. I don't think usage has survived to present day, but I have met a few old people who can only speak Japanese and Taiwanese, but not Mandarin. Today Taiwanese is mostly a spoken language, but you can find it written. Sometimes it's a mixture of hanzi and Latin characters to supplement missing characters. I've heard that there is also an adapted Zhuyin used to write Taiwanese, but I've never seen an example of it.
tl;dr Zhuyin and and Taiwanese kana were developed during approximately the same time, but separately, and for separate languages.
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#64It seems like the Hangul[0]/Korean writing system was retrofitted into Chinese with the challenge being to make the imprecise precise. Hangul was designed with the purpose of solving illiteracy and so the character forms were built simply from sound components. Doing it in reverse with a larger unstructured set of symbols is quite the feat. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
Korean is not a tonal language. But Hangul is great, I wish Thailand would adopt it.
But why? Vietnamese are doing just find with Latin alphabet with few extra characters (same as many Slavic languages). You don't need any special writing system to have tones in regular alphabet.
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a non-chinese pinyin input is so much easier. One of the cool things about it is you can type a whole sentence just using the first letter of each character. Eg “wxzdnwsmbq” on my phone is sufficient to produce “我想知道你为什么不去”. In English I’d have to type the whole sentence “I want to know why you didn’t go”. The other great thing about it is if you remember the pronunciation of a word but forget the tone and/or char…
Isn’t that sort of like letting auto correct pick the sentences you are texting? One can definitely do that, it’s a cool novelty for Reddit posts, but it isn’t useful. The nicer thing is they you can type timeless pinyin and then pick the characters you actually meant, useful if you can sort of recognize what you want to say.
Not really. It’s better than English word prediction, because you’re providing some info about what you want to say meaning it’s correct more of the time. You can also type additional pinyin characters in the middle to help the algorithm, eg typing “adly” gives “阿的理由” (wrong), but “aodly” is enough to get “澳大利亚”.
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know some overseas Chinese people who (not being raised in China) never learned pinyin and prefer the stroke method. I knew someone who used wubi in preference to pinyin input. She grew up in Guangzhou until age 16, so it wasn't an issue of not learning pinyin. The problem, for her, was that she had no way to know the correct pinyin for a character, since she didn't distinguish between a bunch of sounds that are…
Pinyin is the romanization method for Mandarin (aka Putonghua). From your description it sounds like your friend being more comfortable in Cantonese than Mandarin. (Is there really a difference between not fully understanding pinyin and not distinguishing the different sounds?) Anyway these days Cantonese input methods are getting better (or so I heard, my fingers have muscle memory of Changjie by now). See https://j…
> (Is there really a difference between not fully understanding pinyin and not distinguishing the different sounds?)
Yes. They aren't even related ideas. You can easily understand that a distinction exists despite the fact that you, personally, can't hear it. Is there a distinction between not understanding the RGB model and being colorblind?
> From your description it sounds like your friend being more comfortable in Cantonese than Mandarin.
She was fully fluent in Mandarin. Just Cantonese-accented Mandarin. Mandarin is the language of instruction everywhere in China; it isn't possible not to speak it.
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t that sort of like letting auto correct pick the sentences you are texting? One can definitely do that, it’s a cool novelty for Reddit posts, but it isn’t useful. The nicer thing is they you can type timeless pinyin and then pick the characters you actually meant, useful if you can sort of recognize what you want to say.
Not really. It’s better than English word prediction, because you’re providing some info about what you want to say meaning it’s correct more of the time. You can also type additional pinyin characters in the middle to help the algorithm, eg typing “adly” gives “阿的理由” (wrong), but “aodly” is enough to get “澳大利亚”.
I tried writing a sentence (我想去買東西) with iOS pinyin keyboard traditional and while I had some luck with the first two letters, it breaks on "wxq" to work again with "wxqm" and then break again. So it's definitely not as good as you market it.
However it could be explained by the fact predictive typing on iOS is quite poor. Often a wrong letter in a word need to be corrected and the next predicted word (and it's conjugation; I'm speaking of French and English input) is often wrong. It may not be noticeable for someone who never used another keyboard, but as a former Windows Phone user the difference is very easy to see. The WP prediction was mind blowing and I could indeed write long sentences in French just by typing a few letter and using one of the prediction candidates.
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. It’s better than English word prediction, because you’re providing some info about what you want to say meaning it’s correct more of the time. You can also type additional pinyin characters in the middle to help the algorithm, eg typing “adly” gives “阿的理由” (wrong), but “aodly” is enough to get “澳大利亚”.
I tried writing a sentence (我想去買東西) with iOS pinyin keyboard traditional and while I had some luck with the first two letters, it breaks on "wxq" to work again with "wxqm" and then break again. So it's definitely not as good as you market it. However it could be explained by the fact predictive typing on iOS is quite poor. Often a wrong letter in a word need to be corrected and the next predicted word (and it's conju…
Ok but you can type wxqmdx which works! Maybe "whole sentence" is overselling it but it definitely works for some pretty long stretches of characters.
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought Zhuyin was like kana because it was designed during the Japanese occupation?
Zhuyin was created on the Mainland during the ROC era, and brought to Taiwan after the Japanese surrender, where it is now the most prominent phonetic system. Prior to the KMT retreat to Taiwan, Mandarin was not widely spoken here. Before Japan colonized Taiwan, Taiwanese language (Minnan) was usually written using Latin characters with diacritics. During the Japanese colonial era, they attempted to introduce Taiwane…
Ah, ya, that was a dumb thought on my part then. Of course if it was initiated by the ROC, they wouldn't have been in Taiwan in the 1920s.
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t that sort of like letting auto correct pick the sentences you are texting? One can definitely do that, it’s a cool novelty for Reddit posts, but it isn’t useful. The nicer thing is they you can type timeless pinyin and then pick the characters you actually meant, useful if you can sort of recognize what you want to say.
Not really. It’s better than English word prediction, because you’re providing some info about what you want to say meaning it’s correct more of the time. You can also type additional pinyin characters in the middle to help the algorithm, eg typing “adly” gives “阿的理由” (wrong), but “aodly” is enough to get “澳大利亚”.
But why not just type "aodaliya"? If you have the muscle memory for it already, it seems like abbreviating and still getting the right result would take more time than it was worth. Even on a phone I'm not seeing a win.