Typing Chinese faster than English
I belatedly realised a nice ‘hack’ when it comes to typing Chinese. It seems most predictive text software allows really speedy shortcuts in typing. For example, to type ‘ 你好 ’, you can get away with just typing ‘nh’. I find this pretty incredible - in this example with just two characters you can get to characters composed of many strokes. This extends out to longer compound ‘words’ too. ‘zmy’ leads to ‘ 怎么样 ‘ for instance. Just experimenting a bit, ‘wyjzl’ (trying to type ‘ 我已经做了 ’) leads to a menu with ‘ 我已经走了 ‘ as first choice, but of course the software remembers mappings from commonly used stroke combinations so that next time, ‘ 做了 ’ comes up first. Thought I’d add this as a short entry, as this behaviour was not obvious to me at all after some months of entering Chinese through my phone and computer. Not sure if there are similar innovative methods for inputting English, but for now I would say that combined with the general compactness of Chinese...