Guideline: How to type Chinese?
Guideline: How to type Chinese?
Ziling, Shen
9-4, H
Mr. Franks
Apr. 25, 2022.
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I have always been fascinated in linguistics and started using Double Pinyin about two weeks ago. Now, I am learning Xiaohe Yinxing. I use Sogou? as my inputting software.
Words with a crossing line like this are meant to be funny.
[Hover on the superscripts to quickly see the foot note or end note.]
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Introduction
Have you ever managed to type Chinese?
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Chinese is not based on letters or alphabets and is certainly hard to type. Since the computers were invented,[1] typing Chinese had become a problem. As a common sense, there are loads of Chinese characters. The most common Chinese characters that can enable you to read an easy newspaper would be around from 3000~6000. Unicode is a collection of all the symbols and words that is widely used on the internet and personal computers, and it contains almost one hundred thousand[2] Chinese characters. [3][i]
[1]?I have organized my language like this is because that the computers are invented later than Chinese, or otherwise it would be “Since Chinese was invented…”.
[2]?95,005.
[3]?However, you would not be typing things like??????????in your daily life.
[i]?Chinese Character Unicode?https://www.qqxiuzi.cn/zh/hanzi-unicode-bianma.php
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But there are still some ways to type Chinese. First, let's discuss what has formed the Chinese characters.
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A Short Discussion: What Forms the Characters?
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Chinese has different systems for speaking and writing.
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Every character has a Pinyin[4]. The Pinyin indicates how the character sounds. There are three parts of one Pinyin: the consonant[5], the vowel[6] and the tone[7]. Sometimes the consonant will be missing if the word is an onomatopoeia. There are only a few words that correspond to more than one Pinyin, but many words can share the same Pinyin. This may become a problem that I will address later.
[4] Sometimes one character has multiple.
[5] There are twenty-four, and all are formed by English consonant letter(s).
[6] There are thirty-five.
[7] There are five, and are noted on the vowel.
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Also, one character also needs to be written - not in Pinyin. They are written in strokes that may contain certain fixed structures[8]. The strokes may appear differently in different words, but they can still be distributed into a limited number of groups[9] – the Horizontal, the Vertical, the Left-Falling, the Right-Falling and the Others[10].
[8] We call them “radicals”.
[9] There are five.
[10] I would use capitalization here to emphasize that “Others” is the name of the group.
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A Small Problem Sets.
To state our problem more exactly, how to fit Chinese onto the twenty-six keys[11]. The problem for typing all language is that not all possible combinations will end up in meaningful words.
[11] If you have a normal computer.
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For Example, …
The average word length in American English in 2020 is around 4.77 letters per word.[ii] Webster's Third New International Dictionary… includes some 470,000 entries. [iii] Researchers … estimated [that there are] 1,022,000 [English] words and that the number would grow by several thousand each year.[iv] However, most of them are not useful. Only 3000~5000 vocabularies are used in daily communication.[v] 13,000 words are required in the TEM-8 exam[12].[vi] According to Baicizhan, an app that can estimate the user’s English vocabulary, my vocabulary is around 13,500.[13] Take 13,000 as an example, if all of the combinations are used, the average word length is only around 2.91,[vii] and 4.77 is 64% longer than that. This exemplifies one factor that makes typing slow: Repeated Code Rate (RCR). The number 2.91 has significant importance because it indicates the least letters possible to code the whole language.
[12] Test for English Majors-Band 8, proposed by Teaching Guiding Committee for College Foreign Language Majors in China in 1991.
[13] Hmm. TEM-8 is not so hard.
[ii]Average Length of the English Language?https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-word-length-in-the-English-language-Different-colours-indicate-the-results-for_fig1_230764201
[iii] How Many English Words Are There?https://www.merriam-webster.com/help/faq-how-many-english-words
[iv]How Many English Words Are There?https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-word-length-in-the-English-language-Different-colours-indicate-the-results-for_fig1_230764201
[v] How Many English Words Are There?https://www.hjenglish.com/new/p1350481/
[vi] How Many English Words Are There?https://wenku.baidu.com/view/aa156b670b1c59eef8c7b438.html
[vii] I calculated this with the Windows calculator.
Typing Methods in Chinese
The main typing methods to type Chinese are based on speaking (verbal) or writing (scriptum) or both (coniungimus).
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How Many Chinese Characters Are There
How Many Chinese ? Characters Are There[viii]
[viii] Feng, Zhiwei. Standardization and Universalization of Chinese Characters in the Informational Era. 1997.
Number of Characters? ??Number of Increasement? ? ?Coverage Percentage
500? ??500? ? 78%
1000? ??500? ? 90%
2400? ??1400? ? 99%
3800? ??1400? ? 99.9%
5200? ??1400? ? 99.99%
6600? ??1400? ? 99.999%
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The Dream of the Red Mansion contains 731,017 words, but it only used 4200 characters. There are a lot of characters, but we don’t use them all.
Suppose that there are 5200 characters in Chinese and all the combinations are used, the least possible keys to type is 2.63 keys. Since Chinese doesn’t include words connections such as calculate and calculation,[14] due to that most Chinese word groups represent all of the parts of speeches,[15] this number could be really close to 2.63. Thanks to the Intelligent Pinyin, this number could be even less than 2.63 with the basis of the Big Data and dynamic phrase formation.
[14] If you really want to know, they are correspondingly “計算” and “計算”.
[15] As in the example above.
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Verbal
There are two main types of typing Chinese verbally: Full Pinyin and Double Pinyin. Based on the Pinyin system, both typing methods[16] have two large bugs:
[16] Full Pinyin and Double Pinyin.
1.???? First, the high RCR[17]. Key combinations such as “f-o” and “g-e-i” has only one word to correspond to, but things like “s-h-i” will correspond up to 206 characters. That much characters will all end up being in the waiting list, and the user must use a lot of time to scroll up and down to find the solution that he or she wants.
[17] Please remember that RCR stands for “Repeated Code Rate”.
2.???? Second, the accents. This problem is especially severe in the earlier times. There are confusing Pinyins: The endings -n and -ng, which may still be confusing to a well-educated Chinese. Our Ethics and Law teacher never makes the separation between n and l.[18]
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[18] She comes from Szechuan.
Waiting List of Computer Pinyin?
After typing a Pinyin, the software will offer a waiting list for this possible combination. Press spacebar to choose the first one in the waiting list and press the corresponding numbers to choose other candidates. Use “-” and “=” to scroll to the previous or the next page. You can also set the setting to another mode to select words: the waiting list will not appear until you have pressed the spacebar, and after pressing the spacebar you can use letters instead of numbers to choose the word. This method increases the keys needed to be pressed, but it allows the user not to move their hands to reach the numbers on the top of the keyboard.
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Most of the intelligent?software will also automatically change the sequence of the words by how often use choose the word and how often other users choose the word.
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Sogou can connect to the internet and check the new hot words and road names. It also has some humanized features such as use the English comma instead of the Chinese comma after it detects you typing numbers.
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Full Pinyin – Beginner’s Way
The Full Pinyin is the most commonly used method to type Chinese and it is the way that beginners learn as in primary school.[ix] It is easy to type Full Pinyin as long as the user can understand the Pinyin system: Just type the Pinyin you want. The Tone is (often) not included in the typing. The special vowel ü is substituted by the letter v, because v does not appear in the Pinyin system.
[ix] Personal experience: I was taught Full Pinyin when I was in third grade. By then I was slow in typing and didn’t know that I had ten fingers.
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Certainly there are a lot of benefits using this typing method:
1.???? It is easy to learn;
2.???? Almost everyone uses this method to communicate, so if you bought a computer from America and you don’t know English, you can still use Pinyin to chat. However you would probably be more willing to make notes to the examination with a typing method different with the examination teacher’s.
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Although this typing method is widely used and easy to learn, there are still two great problems with this typing method[19]:
[19] And if the two problems using Pinyin were already included.
1.???? The average code length (for one word) of Full Pinyin is around 3.9 keys.[x] It will definitely slow the typing speed down if there are large amounts of and repeated keys to hit. That is why people who use other methods to type Chinese have this discrimination.
[x] Personal experiment.
2.???? Others can easily use your computer and type.
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That is why Double Pinyin is invented.
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Double Pinyin – Evolution
There are too many repeated keys in Full Pinyin and Wubi is too hard! Double Pinyin is easy to learn and fast to type. There are many solutions[20] to type Double Pinyin; the most common ones are:
[20] i.e.: Key distribution.
Xiaohe Double Pinyin;[21]
Natural Code;
Intelligent ABC;
Microsoft Double Pinyin.
?[21] I use this.
Note: The names listed above are called solutions, and Double Pinyin is a method. A method has different solutions under it.
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Some Double Pinyin uses the key “;”. In the following explanations of how Double Pinyin works, I will use Xiaohe Double Pinyin as the solution.
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The basic idea of Double Pinyin is that Pinyins in a long sentence are distributed as consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel. The keys at the odd places will be consonants and the even places will be vowels. For example, if you want to type the Pinyin “t-i-a-n”, you can type “t” for “t”, and “m” for “i-a-n”.[22] In this case, Double Pinyin has reduced the key numbers to only 50%.
[22] For no reason, every Double Pinyin tutorial teaches you to type “t-i-a-n” at first, just like all the programming languages tell you to print “Hello World!”.
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Most of the vowels have more than one letter, but only three consonants denotes two letters: “s-h”, “z-h” and “c-h”. They are cleverly represented by “u” “v” and “i” due to that these vowels never appear in the beginning of the Pinyin. That’s to say, they cannot be a Pinyin on their own.
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There is a significant difference between the Double Pinyin solutions: Some, like Xiaohe Double Pinyin, encourages to type one key continuously. For example, “w” stands for “w” and “e-i”, and the Pinyin “w-e-i” represented by “w-w” exists. However, in solutions like Microsoft Double Pinyin, “w-w” either represents “w-i-a” or “w-u-a”, which both don’t exist. Indeed, avoiding using one key continuously will speed up the typing process, but it is also harder for the learners to learn since there is no connection between “w” and “u-a” or “i-a”.
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The creators of Double Pinyin solutions will consider another thing: there are 35 possible vowels but only 26 keys.[23] Some vowels must share the same key. All of the common solutions solved this problem successfully. For example, in Xiaohe Double Pinyin, “l(fā)” can mean “i-a-n-g” or “u-a-n-g”. Yet, “k-l” can only mean “k-u-a-n-g” instead of “k-i-a-n-g” because the combination “k-i-a-n-g” doesn’t exist. This also works to rest of the keys.
[23] If the “;” is used, then 27.
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However, as I have mentioned before, some onomatopoeias do not have a consonant, which will interrupt the consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel structure.
1.???? For the Pinyins which have only one vowel letter, in some solutions, you can add “o” before the consonant you want, such as “o-e” for “e” and “o-o” for “o”. In others, you can repeat the vowel, like “a-a” for “a”. However, typing with two keys for these is unnecessary. As I have said before, “u” “v” and “i” are used for “s-h”, “z-h” and “c-h” is because that they never appear in the beginning of a Pinyin and cannot be a Pinyin on their own. Therefore, the only possible one-letter combination would be “o” “a” and “e”. Since no Pinyin follows vowel-consonant structure, it is easy to recognize a one-letter Pinyin.
2.???? For two-letter Pinyin that is a vowel, type the two letters directly.
3.???? For three-letter Pinyin that is a vowel, type the first vowel letter and the key that represents the whole vowel. For example, “h” stands for “a-n-g” and “a-n-g” should be “a-h”.
4.???? There are no four-letter Pinyin that is possible to be a Pinyin itself.
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Sogou supports typing Full Pinyin and Double Pinyin at the same time.
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Scriptum
Another way to type Chinese is not based on how the characters sound like, but how they look like.
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Wubi – King of All Kings
The Wubi Method
It took the scientists a lot of time. From 256 keys to 188 to 35, the number of keys on the heavy metals have always been deducing. Until someone had made it to 25.[24]
[24] The key “z” is not used.
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To the users of Pinyin, Wubi is nothing but hard. The Wubi method, literally “Five Strokes”, is also called “Wang’s method”, in honor of the inventor, Professor Yongmin Wang. It was invented in the August of 1983, and is mostly used before 2000, since the Pinyin orthography was not stable and not widely or correctly introduced by then. Due to copyrights, there are no other branches or solutions to the Wubi method, but Professor Wang has developed the Wubi method during the time, which leaves us with three versions of it:
·?????? V. 86;
·?????? V. 98;
·?????? V. the New Era (also called V. 18030, revised according to V. 86).
There are only few differences among the versions.
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In the Wubi method, each key represents a radical of the character. Even though the graph looks extremely complicated[25] and it seems that the RCR would be really high, but this time, Professor Wang was proven correct. In the Double Pinyin method, 2 keys can locate one Pinyin, and in Wubi, 2.3 keys can locate one word.
[25] If you have guessed so, you are correct.
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Some benefits of Wubi:
1??????? The RCR is incredibly low. You can type complicated words with four keys and don’t need to scroll up and down as in Pinyin. You also can look at the keyboard instead of the screen.
2??????? The keys needed to type is 2.3 on average and 4 by most.
3??????? 四碼唯一，直接上檔。When the four keys represent only one character, the character will be directly displayed on the screen. This spared a lot of time pressing spacebar and selecting candidates.
4??????? Learning function. When you doesn’t know how to type part of a character, use “z”, and it will be anything that is possible. The software will also tell you the correct key to press. Also, if you want to type “要”, which is “s-v”, after you have typed “s”, the selecting list will appear “要v” to tell you what to press next.
5??????? Word groups can be typed with less keys. However, the word group must be included in the offline database in the computer.
5.1?????? For two-character word groups, type the first two letters in the first character and the first two letters in the second character, forming a four-letter code for the word group.
5.2?????? For three-character word groups, type the first letter in the first character, the first letter in the second character and the first two letters in the last character.
5.3?????? For four-character word groups, type the first letter of each character.
5.4?????? For word groups with more than four characters, type the first letter of the first three characters and the first letter of the last character. “中華人民共和國” can be shortened from “k” “w-x-f” “w” “n” “a-w” “t” “l(fā)” to “k-w-w-l”.
6??????? The structure was strictly set. It may seem that the radicals are distributed randomly by Professor Wang, but there is in fact patterns in it.
6.1?????? The keys “Q” “W” “E” “R” “T” represent the radicals whose first stroke is the Left-Falling.
6.2?????? The keys “Y” “U” “I” “O” “P” represent the radicals whose first stroke is the Right-Falling.
6.3?????? The keys “A” “S” “D” “F” “G” represent the radicals whose first stroke is the Horizontal.
6.4?????? The keys “H” “J” “K” “L” “M” represent the radicals whose first stroke is the Vertical.
6.5?????? The keys “X” “C” “V” “B” “N” represent the radicals whose first stroke is the Others.
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Some drawbacks of Wubi:
1.???? It is hard. You need to recite the memorization phrases for the whole time, and all your classmates and colleagues will see you 王旁青頭提五一 士土二干十寸雨 大三肆頭古石廠 木丁西 工戈草頭右框七…
2.???? You would seem old. Wubi users are almost extinct.
3.???? One key can represent many things, so you cannot read Wubi as the computers do.
4.???? Sometimes you may forget how does the word look like.
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Sogou supports typing Full Pinyin and Wubi at the same time.
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The Death of Wubi
How many people still use Wubi today? Rare. There are more people who have won the lottery than those who type Wubi. It is obvious that the killer of Wubi is Intelligent Pinyin. Wubi can use less than four keys to locate one character, but when you can type word groups, who still cares about single characters? By the end of the 2000s came the death of Wubi. However, the fastest way to type Chinese is still Wubi.
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Coniunctio
What if we have both?
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Xiaohe Yinxing - Realization
Welcome Xiaohe Yinxing, literally Xiaohe Sound and Structure. It uses two different systems: Xiaohe Double Pinyin and Xiaohe Writing System, which[26] is similar to the Wubi system. Each word can be typed with four letters, with the first and the second letters indicating the Double Pinyin of the word and the third and fourth letters indicating the first and the last structure of the word. Comparing to Xiaohe Pinyin, it uses more keys but have a low RCR and can also support 四碼唯一，直接上檔。When the four keys represent only one character, the character will be directly displayed on the screen. The structure of key distributions are also accorded on the sound they make instead of their first stroke as used in Wubi. It also supports typing word groups as in Wubi: “中華人民共和國” can be shortened from “v-s-l-l” “h-x-r-u” “r-f-p-n” “m-b-v-v” “g-s-c-b” “h-e-h-k” “g-o-k-y” to “v-h-r-g”.
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In Alia Manu
But what about our phones? 26 keys would definitely seem too small and crumpled on the screen. Even though Baidu, Sogou and Xunfei have keyboards that allow the user to type as wrong as possible while still giving the correct solution that the user wants, that’s not called a development or innovation. That is all AI who has studied zillions of Chinese texts.
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9 Key – Less Keys, Larger FingersMore Enjoyment
Pinyin 9 Key
Thus, the 9 key solution was developed. It seemed that this solution was developed in a hurry, since all the letters were arranged in the alphabetical order. Well in fact it was. I believe that if the arrangements were more carefully organized, the RCR would be significantly lower. Since the keys were larger, you can type with large fingers you will make fewer touching mistakes. The 9 key method is designated for the Full Pinyin method, since with Double Pinyin and Wubi the RCR would be too high. I use this method to type on phone.
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Double Keys – An Easy Change
For users who are already accustomed to the 26 keys method and has large fingers, they can certainly try the Double Key method developed by Xunfei. Like the 9 key method, it was made in a hurry. This method does not have a high RCR for Full Pinyin, but it is still high for Double Pinyin and Wubi.
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Handwriting
Use your hand to write on the screen. There is either full screen handwriting or half screen handwriting, depending on the size of your device. You can also write phrases and sentences at once.
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Strokes
Type in the five kinds of strokes: the Horizontal, the Vertical, the Left-Falling, the Right-Falling and the Others. Since most characters includes fixed structures, typing with strokes wastes a lot of time. A word usually needs more than 8 keys.
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Zhuyin
This is usually used in Hongkong and other areas. It is similar to Pinyin but do not have four-letter vowels. The letters are also strange.
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Voice Input
Xunfei, a linguistics company who focuses on inputting, invented the best voice input of Chinese in the world. Not only does it support Mandarin, it also supports four other languages (and the simultaneous translation among them) and twenty-three accents. It promises the user to type 400 characters per minute with an accuracy over 98% in any circumstances. You can also write on the phone’s keyboard without switching to the handwriting mode.
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What’s Next?
Baidu is developing “AI Handwriting”. The user needs to write 12 characters and Baidu can generate a whole font for you based on the 12 characters.
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Sogou and Baidu are developing AI writing. It allows the user to enter some topics or short sentences and it will form a whole passage. However, some AI generated passages does not make any sense.
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You have learned the basics of how to type Chinese. Now let’s try it…
Links and Citations
[Press on the links while holding Ctrl to visit the site.]
Sogou Pinyin?https://pinyin.sogou.com/
Sogou Wubi?https://wubi.sogou.com/
Xunfei?https://srf.xunfei.cn/
Xiaohe Double Pinyin and Xiaohe Yinxing?https://flypy.com/
Footnotes and Endnotes
[1] I have organized my language like this is because that the computers are invented later than Chinese, or otherwise it would be “Since Chinese was invented…”.
[2] 95,005.
[3] However, you would not be typing things like ???????? in your daily life.
[4] Sometimes one character has multiple.
[5] There are twenty-four, and all are formed by English consonant letter(s).
[6] There are thirty-five.
[7] There are five, and are noted on the vowel.
[8] We call them “radicals”.
[9] There are five.
[10] I would use capitalization here to emphasize that “Others” is the name of the group.
[11] If you have a normal computer.
[12] Test for English Majors-Band 8, proposed by Teaching Guiding Committee for College Foreign Language Majors in China in 1991.
[13] Hmm. TEM-8 is not so hard.
[14] If you really want to know, they are correspondingly “計算” and “計算”.
[15] As in the example above.
[16] Full Pinyin and Double Pinyin.
[17] Please remember that RCR stands for “Repeated Code Rate”.
[18] She comes from Szechuan.
[19] And if the two problems using Pinyin were already included.
[20] i.e.: Key distribution.
[21] I use this.
[22] For no reason, every Double Pinyin tutorial teaches you to type “t-i-a-n” at first, just like all the programming languages tell you to print “Hello World!”.
[23] If the “;” is used, then 27.
[24] The key “z” is not used.
[25] If you have guessed so, you are correct.
[26] I mean the latter one.
[i] Chinese Character Unicode
[ii]Average Length of the English Language
[iii] How Many English Words Are There
[iv]How Many English Words Are There
[v] How Many English Words Are There
[vi] How Many English Words Are There
[vii] I calculated this with the Windows calculator.
[viii] Feng, Zhiwei. Standardization and Universalization of Chinese Characters in the Informational Era. 1997.
[ix] Personal experience: I was taught Full Pinyin when I was in third grade. By then I was slow in typing and didn’t know that I had ten fingers.
[x] Personal experiment.
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A Short Afterword
????I have promised to upload my essay onto Bilibili in this text, linked below:
????This text?is directly copied from my Word document, and I have fixed some bugs and formatting mistakes when copying it down. Before I have written this essay, I have not realized the magnificent functions in Word. It is a wonderful software.
????I love Bilibili and its text uploading function, but in my true mind, the editor on Bilibili is not as good as even a quarter?of Word.
????Some functions that are originally available on Word were substituted: For example, footnotes and endnotes were directly changed into those who are under the paragraph, in which they were included. Also, if a sentence or words are marked with brackets [like this] were those that are included in my text, and I have to delete them due to that Bilibili may not support these kind of texts or functions.
????Sorry for my English being not perfect, in which some of the reason is that I turned of the grammar and spelling checking function at some time during the writing of the essay in Word. The other part of the reason is that I'm focusing to much on Japanese. I mean, why bother learning Japanese? For our beloved Misaka Mikoto.
????Happy Birthday Misaka Mikoto!
????君の指先を舞ってる電光は、私の一生変わらない信仰であり、このレールガンだけが永遠に生きてる！
