Psst! It's Never Been Easier To Write Chinese

Confession: I have never actually put pen to paper and written a Chinese character myself, but I find I'm able to write whole sentences containing complex characters, and at speed. How??

The answer is technology.

To be precise, it's technology aided by a standard notation called pīnyīn (literally "spell-sound"). Pīnyīn is a romanised transliteration of Chinese characters that is easy to read, because it also supports diacritical marks to denote tones.

[Hey, why doesn't China just adopt the Roman script, like Vietnam, Turkey and Indonesia have done? Unfortunately, while pīnyīn can show how a word is pronounced, it loses a lot in the translation from the corresponding Chinese character. More than one Chinese character is pronounced the same way. It's only the written form that disambiguates them, or context in the spoken realm. Abandoning the original Chinese characters for pīnyīn will result in huge confusion.]

In today's world of computers and software-mapped keyboard input, it's possible to type using the Roman script, and have the computer automatically present us with a set of candidate characters. It's far easier to recognise a character than to write it, and since the software is generally smart enough to show us the most likely character first, all we have to do is press the spacebar to select it and move on to the next.

I type the Roman characters "w" and "o", and the software keyboard automatically pops up a set of Chinese characters that are pronounced "wo" (all tones included). The most likely word is 我 wǒ ("I"), so I just press the spacebar to select it.

I'm told this is how Chinese Millennials do all their "writing".

I used Google's Pinyin keyboard plugin on Ubuntu to type this sentence:

我能写中文得很快 wǒ néng xiě zhōngwén dé hěn kuài ("I can write Chinese (very) fast")

[Update: One of my Chinese friends read this post and suggested an improvement to the last sentence:

由于科技有进，我能把中文写得快多了 yóuyú kējì yǒu jìn, wǒ néng bǎ zhōngwén xiě dé kuài duōle ("Thanks to advances in technology, I can write Chinese much faster")]