Pinyin, stroke-count, or something else?

December 9, 2019 2:10 PM

How do most native Chinese speakers type Chinese characters on their smartphones? Do they use a system based on romanization, some variation of the stroke count method, handwriting, or something else?

Googling from the USA it looks like pinyin entry is most common, but I wonder what the case is among native speakers in China and Taiwan.

Bonus points if you can point me to videos that demonstrate the text entry system.

(I recognize that the answers may be different for Mandarin and other dialects. Information on that would also be appreciated.)

posted by Winnie the Proust to Writing & Language (10 answers total)

I interact with a decent number of international students from China, and from what I see with them (and my parents and their Chinese immigrant friends) they pretty much all use pinyin, which they've all learned in school. Some, mostly older folks, will prefer handwriting, which is a standard input option on most smartphones. Here's a decent video going over the different Chinese input options on an iphone; it's from 2015, but from what I can tell not much has changed.

As far as Chinese on the mainland goes, writing in any non-Mandarin dialect really isn't a thing, because everyone learns Mandarin in school - it's the only dialect that gets featured in the media, to the point where not having "distracting"/incomprehensible accents is one of the reasons why dubbing is standard on Chinese television.

Also, as a side note, it seems that among Chinese users sending voice messages on WeChat is about as popular, if not more popular, than texting.
posted by Dante Riordan at 2:59 PM on December 9, 2019 [3 favorites]

I don’t know how much this helps but I’m a scientist and the last small conference I attended with lots of Chinese folks, I watched them input stroke patterns on laptops and smartphones, no roman characters or Pinyin in sight. I wanted to ask a bit about their input systems but that seemed awkward, so we only discussed science.
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:10 PM on December 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

I've spent a fair amount of time in China, and have a fair number of Chinese colleagues who I chat with (in Mandarin) on WeChat. There are a lot of different systems, as mentioned above. Most people I know use pinyin. There is definitely also stroke input available, and you can also put together characters using radicals (small components that comprise characters). I believe this was the way people texted back in the day of dumbphones, like how we used T9.

I don't really know how common radicals are these days, though... from my own anecdotal experience it's almost all pinyin, stroke input and voice messages.
posted by thebots at 6:00 PM on December 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

From the typos my parents make, I infer that they use pinyin. Their parents used handwriting input, though.
posted by batter_my_heart at 8:58 PM on December 9, 2019

I have many mainland-Chinese colleagues, and they all use a pinyin IME to type characters. They can be pretty smart, and in a lot of cases you don't have to type the entire pinyin word - typing ‘xx’ will predict 谢谢, for example.
posted by Glier's Goetta at 5:55 AM on December 10, 2019

I lived for several years in China- pinyin input is definitely more common, but folks who were educated before the pinyin system was implemented (around Mao's rule in the 50's) would use stroke input due to not having learned pinyin. Some use stroke input as a personal preference, but pinyin is more common, especially among younger folks (under 50, say)
posted by bearette at 7:40 AM on December 10, 2019 [1 favorite]

Most native Chinese speakers educated in Taiwan will be using zhuyin/bopomofo, which is the transliteration system universally used in Taiwan to teach kids to read Chinese. Zhuyin symbols are printed on keyboards used in Taiwan and so it was a logical transfer over to smartphones. Pinyin is now technically the official Romanization system in Taiwan, but the key difference is that it's not used to teach native Chinese speaker children to read/write in the way that it's used in China -- zhuyin is used in Taiwan instead.

Similarly to the mainland, older folks who may not have been educated with zhuyin will also use handwriting input (and everyone will use handwriting input when they need to type a character that they do not know how to pronounce).

For the point of view of this question zhuyin/pinyin input functionally work basically the same -- you type in what you want, say zhōngwén or ㄓㄨㄥ ㄨㄣˊ which both unambiguously indicate the pronunciation of two syllables in Chinese, and up pops the characters 中文 that you need.

With modern systems, as mentioned above, there's a lot of predictive stuff going on, so you can type without tones or just initial letters of stuff and the system will do its best to guess what you mean.
posted by andrewesque at 8:54 AM on December 10, 2019

I’m not a native Chinese speaker but all my native Chinese friends and colleagues use pinyin/predictive text. Things like xx for谢谢, and the like. Its especially good for 4 character phrases; gzgy brings up 各种各样 instantly and saves the trouble of typing ge zhong ge yang. As long as you know the pinyin letter for the first sound of the word, you’re good! So glad I saw my colleague use Google one day. It has saved me so much headache.
posted by chainsofreedom at 9:35 AM on December 10, 2019 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks for all the comments. This gives me a good sense of usage patterns. I'm marking this resolved.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 6:50 AM on December 14, 2019

it seems that among Chinese users sending voice messages on WeChat is about as popular, if not more popular, than texting.

Confirming this. My wife uses this functionality quite a bit, but she also sends texts (in Mandarin, not Pinyin). She has a transcription app on her Huawei cell phone which converts short snippets of recorded speech into simplified Mandarin text, which she cuts-and-pastes to build up longer texts. She'll also manually input the hanzi, writing out the strokes on the screen (when she can't recall the Pinyin). I asked her about the transcribing app and she said it was called Fei Xing. Can't find any results for that via Google; you'd maybe have more luck with BaiDu.
posted by Rash at 12:57 PM on December 14, 2019