To type any Chinese characters, you only have to type the romanization on your keyboard.

A skill you need to learn at this stage is typing in Chinese on your computer or smartphone.

But there are about 2500 commonly used Chinese characters Does that mean that I have to get a keyboard with at least 2500 buttons.

Sogou Pinyin Software On Your

An input method is a typing software on your device that allows you to represent all Chinese characters with the 26 letters in a systematic manner.

We introduce three input methods for Simplified Chinese: Pinyin, five-stroke and handwriting.

As the name suggests, the Pinyin input method uses Pinyin, the Romanization system to represent the pronunciations of Chinese characters.

To use this input method, you first have to be familiar with Pinyin, which is usually the first thing learners of Chinese will learn.

You also need to know the pronunciation of the characters you are typing.

The five-stroke input method utilizes this feature of Chinese characters.

It divides the 26-letter keyboard into 5 areas, and the buttons in each area represent components that are made up of the 5 basic strokes in Chinese: (heng) (shu) (pie) (dian) and (zhe).

An advantage of this input method is that it actually types Chinese in a more straightforward manner what you type is what you see on the screen, you dont have to choose among results.

Therefore, typing with the five-stroke input method can be really fast when you are familiar enough with it.

With this input method, you can input characters whose pronunciation you dont know.

You dont even have to know the order of the strokes in a character, because this input method only recognizes the whole character after you complete writing it.

Two main drawbacks of this method, however, often mean that not many people choose it.

Firstly, it is the slowest, as you have to write each character one by one.

Also, if your writing is not easy to recognize, you have to choose again from the results the machine suggests based on what youre writing.

The second drawback is that you probably need a touchscreen to write.

Computer users are not able to use this input method, because its extremely difficult to write Chinese characters with your mouse.

Sogou Pinyin Mac And IPhone

For Mac and iPhone users, you can find it through your settings.

Sogou Pinyin keyboard is one of the input method software with most users in the Chinese market.

It is powerful for its lexicon and machine learning algorithm to let you type the most efficiently.

You can get keyboards of multiple languages with this app and exchange them according to your needs when you type.

Sogou Pinyin For Mac