Has anyone here used cangjie (倉頡輸入法), wubi (五笔字型输入法), sucheng (速成或簡易)?
It’s pretty cool if you’re into language side quests.
I’ll have to hunt for the first website where I started learning cangjie to provide to y’all (because it was really good), but basically it’s all about typing characters based on components. The components can even be radicals that are broken down further, so it definitely requires understanding and remembering how a character is written.
Pardon my French (ah ha ha). This page doesn’t translate to English for whatever reason, but as you can see from the first photo, the characters can be chopped up into ways that make sense for the cangjie codes. (Link to page with all of this info: Chinois/Saisie du chinois en utilisant la méthode Cangjie — Wikilivres)
I recall researching about this when I was more into alternative keyboard layouts. There’s a thread on chinese-forums.com where someone detailed their process of learning Cangjie. I don’t remember their conclusion though or if they succeeded 
Would be curious of the distribution of keyboard layout preferences amongst natives — I have a suspicion it’s not as popular since it’s a non-phonetic layout
That’d be neat to check out 
– how far are you going to take/have taken this sidequest out of curiosity?
I think the area with the most users of this input method is Hong Kong, though I’m curious how prevalent it is nowadays. Now that jyutping input is more widely available, I see it declining further, though. Now that I think about it, I think I met one person from Hong Kong here who used this method for phone input at least, or maybe it was some other one.
The story of the guy behind it is pretty interesting. One of his motivations was to allow writing even the most arbitrary (to the point of practically not previously being used) characters via the keyboard, allowing Chinese computing to be more “organic”.
I started 3-4 years ago for funsies, and then on and off use it when I’m using characters for Cantonese! I wanna get back into it though
One of the websites I used (just found it after a few hours) was https://www.hkcards.com/cj/article-menu.html
Jyutping is finally available on iOS as of only two years ago, but tbh writing some words in jyutping is so gnarly. Like, 嗰個女仔係我朋友。go go neoi/leoi zai hai ngo pang jau. or 兩個窗口 loeng go coeng hau. The jyutping is kind of cofusing for the oe versus eo sounds, and kind of long. In those cases, cangjie is faster. For characters that aren’t easy to remember in mandarin like 佢 (keoi - meaning him/her), it’s easier to use cangjie or jyutping for sure.
Oof that looks nice. I got some cangjie stickers for my keyboard a few years ago, but typing so much for everything under the sun slowly rubbed them off or diagonal lol.
