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Why Wubi Chinese input is better than pinyin
If you type Chinese on your computer, you most likely use a pinyin-based input method, or some other phonetic typing system. This is an obvious choice as it’s easy to learn and goes hand in hand with...
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China to abolish Chinese characters, replace with pinyin
Just seen this article on BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-42674542.html Bad times. I guess I should’ve seen it coming, really. The CCP are planning to abolish all use of Chinese...
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How to type ü in pinyin input systems
ǖ · ǘ · ǚ · ǜ Type v to get ü If you’re using SCIM, Microsoft Pinyin IME, New Phonetic IME or something similar to type pinyin with tone marks, you’ll want to type ü at some point. That’s u with two...
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Gwoyeu Romatzyh – better than pinyin?
Gwoyeu Romatzyh. Have a guess what language that is. When I first saw it I guessed Mongolian, or maybe Korean for the first word. It’s actually Mandarin Chinese. More specifically, it’s the name of a...
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‘xue’ is not the same sound as ‘shui’!
I’ve noticed that a lot of people studying Mandarin don’t distinguish between the syllables xue and shui. Usually this is at the beginner stage, but sometimes it seems to have become a habit that...
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Speed up pinyin input: be incomplete!
I made a big discovery about typing Chinese the other day. I use pinyin input to type hanzi (despite singing the praises of Wubi), and up till now have been typing out each pinyin syllable in full....
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Use pinyin from Google Translate to practice writing Chinese characters
How to practice writing Chinese characters (hanzi) is one of the biggest difficulties in learning Chinese. You can just learn to only speak and read Chinese, but if you want to write it, you’ll need to...
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Why I deleted the pinyin field from my Mandarin Anki deck
For the last three years I’ve had three fields in my Mandarin Anki deck: hanzi, pinyin and English. This used to work quite nicely with the pinyin toolkit, as it could automatically generate...
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The ‘word-character error’ whilst learning Chinese
The ‘word-character error’ is my term for a common mistake that people learning Chinese make: getting the characters in a word confused when they’re seen in isolation. I think it’s a special kind of...
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The best Android Chinese input method: Google Pinyin Input (谷歌拼音输入法)
What is the best Android Chinese input method? I’ve used Android for quite a while now and need to input Chinese pretty much constantly on a daily basis, mostly for text chatting with people. I have...
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