A few things: 1. Cangjie is still widely used in places that uses traditional Chinese characters. You would still be required to be good at it if you apply for text-heavy office jobs in these places. 2. Radical-based/shape-based methods were extremely popular when the prediction technology wasn't as good (which means Pinyin was significantly slower). It wasn't until late 2000s to early 2010s before this situation has changed. 3. Pinyin without prediction is slow because of what we called the 重码 (lit. "overlap of encoding") problem. For Pinyin the encoding overlaps because many characters may have the same Pinyin; the purpose of all shape-based method is to reduce the overlap problem and thus increase the input speed. 4. ctrans uses cangjie because (1) implementing shape-based methods was much, much more simpler than phonetic-based methods because most (if not all) of the job is table lookup; (2) if we were to use the same UI (or lack thereof) as ktrans the overlap-of-encoding problem of Pinyin would very probably drive you nuts when using it; (3) it is the input method the author uses, however I do admit using Cangjie for simplified Chinese input is kinda peculiar.
Source: me who is a native Chinese speaker and have learned Wubi (a shape-based method for simplified Chinese) in primary school. ________________________________________ From: Silvan Jegen <m...@sillymon.ch> Sent: Friday, July 22, 2022 12:30 To: 9fans Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: ctrans - Chinese language input for Plan9 a...@sdf.org wrote: > > I stumbled onto an instructive video on youtube not that long ago. I'm > > sure there are a few you'll be able to search for. If I understand > > correctly, it's a combination of entering the phoneme by the nearest > > Latin letter, then select from a diminishing range of suitable options > > on the screen. > > There are other input methods based on the shape of the > characters. Some are better with traditional Chinese characters, > other with simplified characters, it's complicated... Let see if some > Chinese comrade share with us his daily life experience. The Japanese > is input writing kana directly with a Japanese keyboard or by romaji > with roman characters on western keyboards (ka -> か, &c) and then > transformed to kanji when necessary. There are different IMEs, but the > principle is the same. I suppose that ktrans is similar, I haven't > tried jet. ktrans seems to be quite different actually. According to the documentation it uses the Cangjie input method [0] which is based on the so called "radicals". These are some more basic elements that the Chinese characters are made of (note that the "radicals" chosen for Cangjie are not identical to the 214 radicals that are commonly used to classify Chinese characters. For the latter see [1]). Every one of these 24 Cangjie radicals gets mapped to an ASCII character and their combinations then uniquely identify a Chinese character (the wikipage at [0] illustrates the approach very well). This input method seems to be old and I have never seen a Chinese person use it. From what I understand, most Chinese people nowadays just write text in Pinyin (a latin transliteration of the Chinese pronounciation) and then the IME helps you choose the correct combination of Chinese characters (potentially taking the context of the text already written into account). Cheers, Silvan [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tba6835d445e07919-Mf1934dc65975e0ca3989d488 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
