So, Jianpin (简拼 / “Simple Pinyin”) is a way of typing Chinese in an input method editor using only the initials of characters’ romanizations, and I think it’s way cool. Like if you’re entering a Chinese typing speed competition, Jianpin is what you’ll use, no exception — it is FAST! You can just type tsg and hit 1 and there, 图书馆.
And for a while now as I’ve frequented Blorptube’s live chatroom for movie and show streams, I’ve cursed my typing speed and felt envious of this super fast system Chinese has. So that’s what’s got me wondering: what would an English-language form of Jianpin look like? The closest thing I know of is predictive text or even stenotype, but they aren’t really the same thing.
And while pondering this question I of course had to come up with my own idea of how “Jianpin for English” might work, but before I share that idea I just want to make sure that no such thing already exists.
In Linux there’s the “typing booster” IME that works almost exactly like this. As a side effect it handles diacritics and emoji.
As an aside, I don’t like it. Without it, some uncommon words take more dexterity to type fast without assistance, but pinyin input has the same issue. And without it I get to do all the micro-choices on what my text looks like; it has a (not distinct but) deliberate style.
All these ‘predict the next word’ technologies have a deep but insidious averaging impact on style, and the lack of practice produces dependence (de-skilling). The same thing has already happened to the 汉字 languages, though earlier because they’ve been using predictive technology from the beginning of computing: regional variants of characters are disappearing, and most people can’t write intelligibly by hand anymore.
Interesting, because it’s a bit different from my own idea and seems more like a sort of standard predictive text program, right? But there’s probably a good reason why I’m not employed as an IME designer!
Ah, I understand.
I has to be modified to make completions in the middle of words, and split joined words.
It doesn’t sound so difficult to do…
Yes, this is just how stenographers type.
It really isn’t though, I pointed this out. I have contemplated trying stenotype (not a cheap hobby, though!), but when I say “like Jianpin” I mean very specifically an input method using the familiar QWERTY keyboard layout and familiar spellings — and decidedly not chording with a special chording keyboard which requires lots of practice and training to memorize.
Creator of Lemmy also makes a unique character input called Thumb-Key that may be along those lines.
Also 8Vim, FlickBoard, Kuaizi.
Thumb-Key is my favorite mobile keyboard! I’m not familiar with Kuaizi but I incidentally have a stroke-based Chinese keyboard on my phone, too. 8vim looks wild.
