In this computer age, the written Chinese language may seem simply too complex to survive. With more than 40,000 characters lacking any phonetic information, such as letter, it is difficult to imagine a keyboard that could include every character and the skill necessary to master such a keyboard.
Chinese character input on a standard English QWERTY keyboard is a real challenge. Dozens of methods have so far been developed for squeezing tens of thousands of different Chinese ideograms into a computer through the 26 alphabetic keys. The techniques range from breaking an ideograms into positional radicals, romanized phonemes, phrasal input, to their combinations and shortcut rules. They have very different challenges for users in memorizing radical mappings on keyboard, the anatomy of ideograms, the pronunciation of words, and the acquaintance with Chinese phrases. Their effectiveness and efficiency are mainly reflected in the accuracy and speed of a skilled user. And as a general rule, the popularity of an input method is a strong indicator of its ingenuity.
Necessity has produced many methods of typing, usually much more efficient than the one just proposed. Unfortunately, among these methods an inverse relationship exists between the amount of time necessary to master the method and the efficiency of the method.
For example, the popular Pinyin method requires little training; one needs only transliterate the character being entered into English letters. However, since multiple characters correspond to a single pronunciation, isolating the desired character from a list of many, does slow the interrupt the process. In addition, phonetic input methods that uses one Chinese dialect are unusable by speakers of another dialect.
Popular Methods
Pinyin Input Method
It is so easy to learn, if you can write or read Chinese, you can input Chinese into your computer in 30 minutes. Use first stroke and last stroke to find the Chinese character you want.
Cheng Jei Input Method
Altogether, there are 25 Chang Jei characters, each of them represent certain part of a word, which resembles the shape of that word, with some modification. Therefore after the users have learnt these 25 characters, simple word can be form by combination. Users have to memorize the 25 characters before they become fluent with this method.
Object-Oriented Design and Graphical Users Interface are the characteristics of Open Chinese for Windows architect. Users need very minimum learning and no memorization of key sequences. The symbolic keys of the Jao Strokes, Phonetic, Chajei and Wenyi are all shown on screen. What you see is what you get, is one of the most uniquely implemented features of Open Chinese for Windows software product. The software itself performs on line scrolling of related Chinese characters in the "Chinese character display blocks." The "Chinese character display blocks" changes its display according to the user's input stroke sequence.
Open Chinese for Windows can also serve as a dictionary for Chinese characters. One can take advantage of this feature to perform look-up and search function by entering strokes mixed with wild cards, i.e., the [?] key. Hence, a wild card serves as a filler for any unknown stroke. Therefore, up to (N-1) wild cards can be used for stroke substitution in searching for a Chinese character. Moreover, Open Chinese for Windows shows the next likely associated characters on line while the user inputting key strokes. Likewise, one can pick the wanted character in the "Chinese character display blocks" by either entering the numerical position indicator or clicking on it by the mouse pointer. Once the desired character is selected, the related strokes are shown in the "Selected Character Strokes Block" for reference.
Provide built-in Hsu's Nature Artificial Intelligent Links in assistant inputted Chinese phrase syntax analyzes. Perform automatically inputted character correction according to the grammar and structure rules of the Chinese sentence in the current input buffer.
Last modified 11/25/98.