Subject: Re: problems with pinyin

From: D-P Deng <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1993 20:36:25 -0500

Though I have difficulties with pinyin, pinyin input is still my exclusive
input method ;-). You see, I may have trouble with "z" and "zh", but I know
it's either "z" or "zh", so it's not too bad to find the right character,
except wasting a bit of time. A pinyin input should be FUZZIER AND
CONFIGURABLE to tune for personal taste. Fuzziness inevitably introduces a
larger set of choices of characters. To cut down the size of the set, a
phrase (cizu) based pinyin input can do the job well. I have played with the
method for a while, my weakness in speaking good putonghua has reduced
considerably.

I am an end user, I'm not going to argue which method is better, but to give
my experience (which probably was brought up before) as input to input method
developers.

1) input with and without a han-zi text next to you.
Without a han-zi text next to me, the sounds of characters pop up in the mind
first. It's kind of nature to type in pinyin. In addition, I don't want to
type in characters I don't know how to pronounce. That makes pin-yin even
more appealing.

With a han-zi text to follow, it's a different story. First, you look at the
characters, the sounds come to your mind after you see the shape of the
characters, it's kind slow to type in pin-yin. You know you are in trouble
when you see something you don't know how to pronounce it ;-).

2) input pin-yin first, then convert into han-zi.
It is probably just a personal preference, I found it fast and less
distracting.

3) cizu or not
It's ok to use cizu to write modern han-yu article, but cizu doesn't help much
when you want to type in gu-wen since gu-wen is mostly single character
based.

It seems to me that we need both a phonetic input method (like pin-yin) and
shape input method (cang-ji).