Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
1.)Regarding the input systems: many Chinese prefer the stroke based system WuBi to the sound based PinYin. Of course, most Chinese words as they are being used are 2 syllables (and thus 2 characters) but each character (except 呢,阿,喔, etc which are just sound bites) is a word in itself with a meaning. I was just giving some simple explanations without going into much detail, since somebody asked. It would be possible to just use PinYin with tone indicators (as demonstrated by Vietnamese, a closely related language that is written in a latin alphabet these days with a few special characters), but a lot of meaning would be lost this way as so many words sound the same. There are dozens of meanings for ji in the first tone alone, each represented by a different character.
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Hi Hans, good to see another person in TW!
I've found that WuBi is common, as well as Cangjie for direct radical input in professional settings, or for typesetting literary text that is not conventional use. However, a huge portion of the younger generation in Taiwan use Zhuyin Fuhao, and in China many younger folks use Hanyu Pinyin for most regular typing. There's an integrated dictionary in most IME systems so that character combinations and context reduce the amount of scrolling through character choices. Phonetic systems aren't the most efficient way to type individual characters or characters of lower frequency...but for general communication, many people prefer it.
Sadly, the only folks in Taiwan who use HP are foreigners (self included when not using Cangjie). Infuriating actually when using Linux, since SCIM/Chewing support for Traditional Chinese in Hanyu Pinyin is a bit rubbish (simplified isn't too bad, since it's dictionary-linked IIRC).