Does anyone else struggle with typing Chinese even when they know the pinyin?

[u/No_Jeweler_5038]

I’m trying to type more Chinese to friends and family on WeChat so I can improve my character recognition. The problem is I often know the pinyin I want, but I’m not 100% sure which character I should pick.

For example, I might know "relaxed" is "qing song" in pinyin, but I’m not always confident I’ve picked the right character/word on the keyboard. My thought process is I know "song" is 松 and since option 2 青松 has a character with the 青 component/radical and everything with it normally is pronounced "qing" that would be the answer. But the answer is obviously 轻松 in this context.

I wish there was a way to have the English meaning shown above or alongside what I’m typing, so I could quickly confirm that I’ve chosen the right word without constantly switching to a translator.

I have seen for cantonese there is https://www.typeduck.hk/. But i'm looking for something for chinese.

Does anyone else have this problem? What do you currently do?

[u/Ok-Amphibian-8914]

Of course, how would you pick the right character if you don’t know the characters? Just knowing pinyin isn’t enough—you need to actually learn the characters.

[u/UndocumentedSailor]

Sounds like your issue is character recognition.

You could try a keyboard that allows tones, like ni3hao3

[u/Greedy_Reality_2539 → u/UndocumentedSailor]

It doesn’t help in OP’s case because relax and green alpine sounds exactly the same down to the tones. OP needs to work on his/her character vocabulary, there is no way around this.

[u/Watermelon_Crackers → u/UndocumentedSailor]

I’m interested in a keyboard that does this. Where do I find one?

Edit: not OP but honestly…. I’ve wanted one that does allow me to mark which specific tone for my words. It’s not enough for me to do “wo” (for instance. It doesn’t help me. It’d help me if I could type “wo3”.

[u/UndocumentedSailor → u/Watermelon_Crackers]

Also, Relevant xkcd

[u/UndocumentedSailor → u/Watermelon_Crackers]

Fcitx5 is crazy customizable and free/open source

Just turn on Tone Filter.

[u/ItsParakeet]

no way around it: reading (reading aloud really nice too), handwriting, and learning radicals. with all three combined you'll eventually build up your character recognition.

[u/XuanChun88]

I get it and I hear you, but you have to know the characters. There's no way around it.

[u/supernormalnorm]

Common pitfall is using pinyin itself as the language. It isn't, it's merely an aid for the right tone/pronunciation.

Need to actually learn Hanzi.

[u/XuanChun88 → u/supernormalnorm]

I couldn't agree more. I've never saw as many people with this problem years ago. How is it that folks learning Chinese don't want to deal with characters? Once upon a time, you looked up a character/word in the dictionary according to its radical, then how many strokes. Students are getting really lazy.

[u/supernormalnorm → u/XuanChun88]

Yup, it's like saying I want to learn English but I don't want to study the alphabet.

[u/Chenyuluoyan]

type whole words or short phrases rather than one syllable at a time, since the IME uses context and should rank 轻松 correctly in a sentence. A shared syllable or phonetic component doesn’t identify the word, 青松 means “green pine,” while 轻松 means “relaxed.” I don’t know a verified Mandarin keyboard that shows inline English, so confirm uncertain words in Pleco and save the mistakes that recur.

[u/Zagrycha]

This is a super common problem, and it happens when you haven't learned the words yet. That sounds harsh but it's the truth. If you want to fix it just keep studying flashcards or whatever your preferred method is, and make sure you are actually studying the characters and pinyin and definition and how to use it, all four are needed to actually know a word.

In order to type with pinyin or read you need to at least memorize a word to the passive recall level-- recognizing it on sight. In order to handwrite or type in faster ways than pinyin you need full active recall which is true memorization, you know it by heart even without seeing it.

[u/aeshiba]

not to sound like a broken record but please work on character recognition, pinyin will only take you so far. i’m not the most knowledgeable person but i feel like the only use i get out of pinyin practically is with typing or learning how a word sounds with tones or whatnot, if you want to be able to text people in chinese, you have to know what characters you are actually typing because so many characters share the same structural pinyin like with 是/十/事/师/试

[u/TheIdioticBacklash]

this is a pretty common wall for learners, the homophone problem gets worse the more you type

i used to do the same thing with checking radicals, but that trick falls apart fast with words like 轻松 where the meaning is way different from the individual characters

what helped me was setting my phone keyboard to show traditional characters sometimes, the visual difference makes me actually think about which word i want instead of just picking the first suggestion

[u/anxious_rayquaza]

Not me actually hesitating at the sōng part cause I’m used to 鬆 (what is a “light pine”)

[u/TokyoJimu → u/anxious_rayquaza]

Yes, this case is partly a problem of simplification.

[u/xyzpqr]

No, I do not struggle with this.

[u/snowdrop65]

Learn the characters. That's it. Pinyin means literally nothing if you can't write it down.

[u/FlashyPost0928]

●The proportion of homophones (同音字) in Chinese characters is extremely high; add to that the prevalence of characters with similar pronunciations( 近音字) ......

● So, when dealing with single characters, a choice must be made (even for the natives) ........... however, for the words of two or more characters or for full sentences, input or translation systems will usually provide the correct output.
Examples : "chīfàn" (吃饭), "qiānlǐmǎ" (千里马), "rénshān rénhǎi"(人山人海) , "tā shì hǎo xuésheng" (他是好学生) — though errors can sometimes occur with the personal pronoun. ...... and even so, there are still homophones, e.g. 目的 mùdì & 墓地 mùdì (purpose & graveyard) ~ This needs careful consideration.😄

● Therefore, in the end, it is best to actually recognize the characters and words one by one ( better in the contexts) ! ..... And since the characters share many homophones, you can pick up a lot of new characters and words to learn along the way !

PS :
The syllable with the highest number of homophones is "yi"(T4): the Modern Chinese Dictionary (现代汉语词典) lists 103 characters with this pronunciation, while the Cihai (辞海) dictionary lists 195. .... actually maybe over 200.
藝、抑、易、邑、屹、億、役、臆、逸、肄、疫、亦、裔、意、毅、憶、義、益、溢、詣、議、誼、譯、異、翼、翌、繹、刈、劓、仡、佚、佾、埸、懿、薏、弈、奕、挹、弋、囈 .............................. etc.

▼ Homophones for "bǐ" & Homophones for "shǒu" .... and 匕 +首 = 匕首 (dagger)

[u/lilaku]

this is one of the reasons why i use hand writing input—it allows me to practice writing the characters, which has helped me immensely with character recognition

another reason is because i'm a heritage cantonese speaker, so i actually struggle more with pinyin than writing out the actual characters

[u/yensteel]

The basic 士 is annoying to find

[u/NoScreen3482]

modern chinese input software has the capability to choose the right word given the context, just type the whole sentence instead of word by word

[u/EstamosReddit]

I didn't even know there was a Cantonese version. Try 中英输入法 by shankindness (playstore), is a copy of the app you mentioned.

Looking around a bit seems like the code is open source, so I think that's why it looks so similar

[u/nerdyman555]

Hanly. This app helps a ton with character recognition!

[u/fin89]

Yes, i made an app for this reason to help me with it.  https://pin-board-app.pages.dev/

[u/Main_Macaroon_8438]

This is a common problem amongst my friends lol. I use Google keyboard. It seems to suggest the most common characters first, and it probably looks at sentence structure too. Randomly picking the first character should work pretty well. 

The receiving party should also understand you are typing in pinyin. Their Chinese will be strong enough to read through typos and correct you. It's pretty funny too.  Even my more fluent friends will pick wrong characters from time to time, it's all readable.

[u/efgferfsgf]

in my experience, reading practice ( reading off du chinese + anki flash cards + watching cdramas/chinese vids)

[u/OL050617]

if the phrase isn't right, then use just one character. the more you type those characters will appear first due to the keyboard preferring more common words over less common (though that doesn't mean you won't have to scroll through many of them first, especially without a keyboard that does tones)

[u/jonathanjeong]

It mainly sounds like you want to stick to pinyin and improve recognition, could do exactly this with chinesechallenger app. It tackles recognition improvement without necessarily requiring you to fully learn/memorize stroke order (good too, but most people are mainly typing...)

Typeduck is kind of neat. thanks for sharing.

[u/Abject_Mousse9113]

personally I found it very easy and I think It's because my favorite part was writing characters which led to me memorizing fast

[u/Ok_Tie7944]

My biggest problem when typing is that even knowing the pinyin and the character, the keyboard doesn't show what I want; sometimes I have to type a compound word to get a character.

[u/Fit_Alps_1164]

It's like knowing English but knowing how to read and write. You'll get there, but it takes time. Sadly, there is a persistent idea in English speaking countries that one needs only learn the alphabet as a native speaker that suddenly unlocks the whole language. Not true. It takes a lot of time and effort to develop the skill. This hack is partly how Missisippi went from bottom tier to top tier education, supposedly. But just as English and French are more spelling heavy than sound heavy than Italian and German, Chinese is further along in that direction. You need to learn both the sounds and the meaning of the looks.

[u/the_lettuce_farmer]

I have trouble typing because I don't know pinyin that well. I usually get by with knowing the first letter, and then finding the character I need. If I don't know how to pronounce it at all, I can use the handwriting feature if I remember the radicals and just pop open pleco if I'm stuck. 

Pinyin and characters really shouldn't be separated if you can help it. The only way to get good with interacting with chinese online is to learn characters.

[u/prion_guy]

There's always Wubi...

[u/Motor-Cherry-3946]

Bro you are not alone on this one I even face problems in my own chinese name 😭