IPad – Using pinyin with tones to input Chinese characters

ipadkeyboardmacostext input

I'm a Chinese learner and know from my teacher that there is software (for Windows), which lets you strictly input withtype in pinyin with tones. E.g. hao3 becomes 好. The Mac OS shipped Chinese input does have pinyin input, but no tone selection, hence you input hao to get 好 (no tone mark). I wonder if there is any way for me to use a pinyin input with tones for Mac OS or on my ipad.

Best Answer

Making the user input a tone used to be the default in OS X, but not since at least OS X 10.8. Now it continues to guess your characters as you keep typing, and since it's pretty good at guessing, I guess tone selection was deemed an unnecessary step.

There may be some way you can fiddle with com.apple.inputmethod.SCIM.plist or com.apple.inputmethod.TCIM.plist to bring the old behavior back, but at least in the preferences menu that option is no longer available.

One thing you can do: after typing the "untoned" pinyin for a character, cycle through the four tones by hitting Tab (it's Option + Tab in Traditional Chinese). This will limit the list of suggestions to one particular tone at a time (it also displays a diacritical mark over your pinyin as a visual indicator of which tone you're on).

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MacBook – How to type numbers while using pinyin input on a non-qwerty keyboard

Could you use the numpad keys under fn? For example fn-J is numpad 1 and fn-K is numpad 2.

Edit: You might also use a private.xml private.xml like this with KeyRemap4MacBook:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
  <item>
    <name>test</name>
    <identifier>test</identifier>
    <inputmode_only>CHINESE_SIMPLIFIED, CHINESE_TRADITIONAL</inputmode_only>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::KEY_0, VK_SHIFT, KeyCode::KEYPAD_0</autogen>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::KEY_1, VK_SHIFT, KeyCode::KEYPAD_1</autogen>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::KEY_2, VK_SHIFT, KeyCode::KEYPAD_2</autogen>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::KEY_3, VK_SHIFT, KeyCode::KEYPAD_3</autogen>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::KEY_4, VK_SHIFT, KeyCode::KEYPAD_4</autogen>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::KEY_5, VK_SHIFT, KeyCode::KEYPAD_5</autogen>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::KEY_6, VK_SHIFT, KeyCode::KEYPAD_6</autogen>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::KEY_7, VK_SHIFT, KeyCode::KEYPAD_7</autogen>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::KEY_8, VK_SHIFT, KeyCode::KEYPAD_8</autogen>
    <autogen>__KeyToKey__ KeyCode::KEY_9, VK_SHIFT, KeyCode::KEYPAD_9</autogen>
  </item>
</root>

Best Answer

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