Using Chinese on a Mac - Traditional Styles

[james009]

Hi there,

I have been using simplified Chinese using pinyin to find the correct characters for some time. I have just switched to traditional and am quite frustrated. When I type in the pinyin the character comes up and I have to search through all the possible characters. But when I try and type in say qingjiao my mac beeps at me... so then I have to type qing, sift through all the characters and then type jiao and sift through all those. And when it's not a commonly used character... well traditional characters are not easy to read on a computer and it takes a long, long, long, time.

Anyone know a better way to input chinese traditional characters on a Mac.. using pinyin as the input method?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Caezar]

Hi there,

I have been using simplified Chinese using pinyin to find the correct characters for some time. I have just switched to traditional and am quite frustrated. When I type in the pinyin the character comes up and I have to search through all the possible characters. But when I try and type in say qingjiao my mac beeps at me... so then I have to type qing, sift through all the characters and then type jiao and sift through all those. And when it's not a commonly used character... well traditional characters are not easy to read on a computer and it takes a long, long, long, time.

Anyone know a better way to input chinese traditional characters on a Mac.. using pinyin as the input method?

Thanks for any help.

If you use pinyin, you will have to decompose words (type qing & jiao separately). As for each word, you will have to go through the list of characters until you find the one you are looking for.

Now, if you do not want to go through this tedious process with the pinyin, you can use the cangjie input method, where you decompose a character into its components. For instance, you will type kou (mouth) + yi (one) + da (big) to get wu (the family name).

You can also try bopomofo as it is more forgiving than pinyin. If you pick the wrong first character (let's say the wrong qing) and type jie afterwards, the input assistant will guess what you want to type (as long as the tone of the first character was right) and will correct to the right qing.