Android Chinese Pinyin IME Roundup
One of the great things about Android is that you can add an entirely new IME to the phone direct from the market place. On WinMo you can add IMEs but it’s a bit of a cock about, and requires a reboot and you can hose the software. iPhone/iPod doesn’t have any other than the phone comes with, to my knowledge. The Chinese IME that comes with Android is actually usable but what about the others on the market place? I took a quick run through a few including Google Pinyin IME and SoGou, both of which are very popular IMEs on PC already. There’s also some fresh faces on the Android market place I took a look at also.
I’m particularly on the look out for a good IME which can be used for English as well because the IME switching process on Android (long press and select from box) is laborious to switch between languages.
Sogou
Mirroring the PC IME, SoGou is a pretty advanced context sensitive pinyin IME. Installing is a breeze (just remember to go into your phone settings and language/keyboard and tick the box next to any new IMEs you have installed) and as is normal on Android, a settings entry appears under the enable/disable tickbox when you’ve installed it. The first thing you’ll want to do is go in and turn off the stupid keyboard sounds, no really who actually wants that crap?
The IME has two keyboard layouts, a phone-like grouped letter/key arrangement which like most of these keyboards relies on being context sensitive to figure out what you mean. For pinyin that means it can be horrific when there’s ambiguity requiring you to clarify what character you meant first up but the upside of these sort of keyboards is that they’re very easy to click – which is kind of important on capacitive touch-screen devices like android phones where it’s very easy to press a wrong key on a QWERTY layout in portrait. SouGou allows you to select which layout you want to use with the phone in portrait and landscape modes, usefully defaulting to the phone pad layout in portrait and QWERTY in landscape. Right away the first drawback I saw is that on the high resolution display of the Nexus One, the phone pad layout has blurry text, the UI has obviously been upscaled to work on these displays but it hasn’t been specifically worked to look nice.
I couldn’t really fault the pinyin IME, although it failed to pick up a couple of chengyu I typed in. The criticism about blurry fonts on the phone pad layout doesn’t apply in any way to the hanzi themselves, these are rendered just peachy and very clear on the N1. Switching between English and Chinese is very easy. In English I found that I had to go into the settings and enable auto capitalisation which is off by default. Unfortunately the auto space is brain dead and wont get rid of a space it’s inserted after a word if you press full-stop. That’s pretty annoying and also the predictive text doesn’t seem to be sorted in terms of likelihood for English, meaning that things you should just be able to hit space (to accept) need you to select the third word on the list of choices for example.
For English there’s no auto spelling correction and not even suggestions with apostrophes. No, sadly you’d switch back to the regular excellent Android keyboard for English. However as a Chinese IME SoGou is great. It’s also the only Chinese IME that does predictive text in English and maybe for some people it would be good enough to stick with it permanently. Not for me though.
Google Pinyin IME
This uses a regular Android-style QWERTY keyboard. The hanzi bar that appears when typing pinyin is much bigger than SoGou and therefore easier to read and easier to click. This is a serious thumbs up for Chinese student like me. The way the prediction works is very intuitive also. I began typing out a phrase but selected part of it earlier to try reset the prediction, it carried on 100% correct but then buggered the last character. It’s obvious what you press on screen to select a number of characters which are correct so you can scoot to the last character and see a list of options. I really like it.
There are no other keyboard layouts so if you think QWERTY in portrait is too cramped then it’s possibly not ideal. That said the layout it does use makes maximum use of space without any extraneous punctuation marks or the like also in the layout, I find it pretty easy to type on in portrait. Like SoGou you can connect up to the cloud and sync your dictionary.
The drawback is that there’s no predictive text for English mode. With punctuation, even comma and full-stop, being on a shift page even in landscape mode (same minimalist keyboard layout is used), it’s really a bit of a pain to type decent English using the Google pinyin IME. Again you’d switch to the default Android keyboard.
Easy Finger Chinese (逸指拼音输入法)
This was brand new at time of writing. I’m struggling to see why the author bothered. It’s substantially worse than I could have possibly anticipated. It’s a standard small Android QWERTY keyboard. It fails to pick up on just about any sort of phrase I typed in making it effectively one character at a time. The settings are entirely in Chinese, ignoring the location settings on the phone. There’s no predictive text or anything like that for English. Bizarrely this is also the only paid app in the roundup. It’s not a patch on Sogou or Google.
It’s entirely possible I’m missing something here but at any rate it doesn’t seem to be useful for a student of Chinese.
91 (91拼音输入法）
Just plain broken, force closes repeatedly and makes immediate uninstall necessary. Ouch.
Conclusion
So far switching between the regular Android keyboard for English and Google Pinyin IME for Chinese is the best option out there. Sougou is perfectly decent but I find the largest Chinese of Google’s IME the dealbreaker over all. There are a number of other IMEs related to other input mechanisms but I figure those are only really of interest to people who live in China, Taiwan etc. Really all I need to be very happy with the state of things on Android is a utility which will do a quick switch between the Android keyboard and Google Pinyin…
Full internet access would probably be for syncing word list to the cloud – doesn’t the Google one do that too? Contact data though… not sure why it needs that!
I’d agree with you there about Google Pinyin IME. Especially when considering that Sogou has suspicious permission requirements like “read contact data” and “full internet access”…
An IME that has internet access can potentially take your passwords on wonderful excursions!
Yeah the google one also needs the internet permission, but I can trust google with that. I’m just a bit wary of companies I don’t know. Especially when they also want contacs access!
p.s. would have responded earlier but have been getting this problem: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/you-are-posting-comments-too-quickly-slow-down-but-i-am-not
Looks like the timestamps are all messed up since my first post looks like it was sent a day later than it really was and your reply about 12 hours later than reality AND earlier than mine!
That’s very true, an IME pretty much is a keylogger eh?
Ah, I think the messed up order of posts is because I used the Android WordPress app to approve and reply to the comment. Looks like it’s a bit messed up, I’ll keep an eye on that, thanks for the heads up!
P.S. I took a look at the other dictionaries on Android, the licensed ones. I’ll do a post about this later but the unfortunate conclusion is that they’re garbage
hi Mat,
thanks for the post. i dont have an android phone yet, and chinese IMEs will be part of my decision.
can you select between simplified and traditional characters using these IMEs? id prefer to use traditional
thanks
BTW, Hanping Pro is now available. No more ads!
I have to assume they do allow that, most of these things seem to be like that. Particularly since Taiwan is a hotspot for this stuff. I don’t really know for sure though sorry. I will say this though, the IME options on Android are utterly brilliant. Android is way ahead of WinMo and obviously the iPhone in quality of IMEs already.
The IME’s I have seen take typed western characters and convert to Chinese characters. (nv3 -> 女; or shuo1 -> 说). I am looking for a way to type some of the western characters with the pinyin tone marks. With my Android phone (Motorola Droid in USA), I can type ó and ò, but not ō, ǚ, ǚ, and several others. It seems that the characters can be displayed, but not typed. In your experimentation with different IME’s did you ever come across a way to put type the full pinyin character set (with tone marks) in Android?
Jeff I’m sorry to say I haven’t come across any way to do that. I did it for awhile on desktop when I went through a brief phase believing I would use pinyin loads and I wanted to write the tones correctly. There’s a few ways of doing it on PC including a cool pinyin keyboard so you tap a key to do tones, but you can also use the unicode way.
The only suggest I might make is that a unicode escape code ought to work in some sort of basic text editor where the document is a HTML document. That pretty much has to work but it doesn’t sound like it’d be easy or fun. Can I ask why you want to type out pinyin like this?
Can I ask why you’re looking to enter pinyin with the tone markers?
Hi Mat,
You are quite knowledgable about Android, the Nexus One and all things Chinese, I’ve really enjoyed reading your posts. Our interests are very similar; I’m a huge cell phone nerd, Chinese scholar, and just purchased a Nexus One which I should get in a week or two from my friend in Hong Kong, so you seem like the perfect person to answer this question.
I saw your review of Android Pinyin IMEs, but I haven’t been able to find much talk of a finger-drawn, stroke chinese character input system for the Nexus One. I heard some talk of their being one for the HTC Android overlay, but that you could only use it on Nexus One if you “root” the phone (my tech knowledge fails here, not sure what that means), which also carries some risk of messing up the core operating system?. Anyway, your review and others show that the Google Pinyin IME seems to be the best, but is there anything that will keep my character drawing skills sharp?
Thanks a lot,
Matt
Thanks for your comments fella! This felt a bit more like a diary in some respects rather than anything anyone would read so I’m really pleased if it’s useful!
You might need to root the phone but this is surprisingly easy and thankfully there’s an excellent backup system in place so if you really do break anything you can just restore and fix things up. It’s still kinda techy though but I think it’s fairly low on the risk scale when all’s said and done.
Also installing IMEs isn’t as worrisome as it is on WinMo, Android is built with them in mind and ones behaving badly can be simply disabled and removed with no ill effects that I’ve seen. I had an IME that was utterly broken and it wasn’t a problem to deal with it. That would have been disastrous on my WinMo phone…
手写输入法 IMEs are interesting. Basically the HTC stuff has been the best but the one that’s available now doesn’t work on Android 2.0 (Donut) or higher which means the Nexus One (Android 2.1). However there is a HTC handset based on Donut so a new one should be available sharpish. There’s also at least one free option which is in beta and there’s also the Chinese IME from Motorola ripped from the Milestone. This is said to work well.
In terms of actually inputting Chinese, pinyin is clearly the fastest and easiest but it would absolutely be nice to have a handwriting IME, not the least because you could drive any dictionary application with that so you can sketch a character from Chinese subtitles or a sign etc. I have to admit I do this on my WinMo phone still because that runs Pleco which has built in recognition.
You’ve motivated me to check out the options so I’ll install the free one and give the Motorola one a bash as well and report in a post.
Oh, did you see me mention Skritter elsewhere. That ought to work nicely on Android when Flash 10.1 is released – I’m really holding out hope for that being a fully workable handwriting practice for the train commute. Failing that, there are of course a ton of things like this available on the iPod. That’s a whole new kettle of fish.
Hi Mat, I just tried that State Pen IME you mentioned, but I get FC on my Nexus One.
Thanks for all of the info Mat, I’ll check back and see what your opinion of the free and ripped motorola 手写输入法 IMEs are, and then make a decision. I’m no longer a student so I don’t formally study Chinese, but I send a fair amount of Chinese text messages to my girlfriend, coworkers, and friends, so it might be fun to get some practical review that way.
I looked up how to root the phone on XDA dev and it seems pretty straightforward, but maybe I’ll play with it for a while without cracking it to see if I need to. Will I need to root it to install the free/motorola 手写输入法 IMEs?
Thanks again,
Matt
Matt,
The reason I’m asking is that I’m as I’m a beginner to Chinese, I’m focusing on spoken Mandarin. I will do Pinyin along with spoken word, as they seem to go well together, and since Pinyin seems manageable, but the characters might be biting off more than I can chew. A couple of the tools I’m using (or really, at this point tinkering with in anticipation of full-blown use) are Anki (on the PC – see: http://ichi2.net/anki/) and AnkiDroid on my Motorola Droid (on Android, see: http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/AndroidAnki).
I am able to enter the tones on the PC, but cannot do all of them on the Android phone.
PS – if you haven’t tried Anki – it’s a great tool, and you might also want to look at smart.fm – I’ve suggested these two tools to others interested in learning Chinese, or any language.
Hey Jeff. A couple of points here, firstly you’re making exactly the same mistake I did – I think I can call it a mistake but you can be the judge of that. It’s nicer to look at pinyin with tone markers when that’s how you’ve learned it. However on a computer it’s a hell of a lot faster to just to write this: ni3 hao3 ma. Honestly it takes minutes to get used to doing this and it’s a hell of a lot faster, most of the dictionaries will actually take input like this as well – it’s a pretty universal format.
If I was writing a document for a class I’d do it on the PC and use the proper characters because it looks much nicer but I can’t see an upside on mobile.
I’ve heard of Anki, my understanding is that it’s a generic flashcard system that can be used with Chinese right? I use Pleco and I’ve also used ZDT. The fact there’s an Android version of Anki is very interesting and I’d definitely like to check it out.
That said it’d never replace Pleco purely because the commercial dictionaries supply the definitions for cards. The great example sentences in some of the dictionaries I find indispensable, sort of making flashcards bridge a gap between memory cramming and study.
If I can also impart something else. At one point I decided I wasn’t interested in characters, it was spoken and pinyin all the way. It was actually the power of flashcards that helped me see that I could actually read Chinese pretty easily. If I was learning what a word meant on a flashcard it really wasn’t that different to learning what the characters look like. Then on a PC, or a pinyin IME etc, you just type the word and select the one that looks like the one you remember.
Before you know it… you can actually read and write Chinese. Now as to the wisdom of actually learning how to handwrite Chinese, well that’s another matter entirely but I’d definitely urge getting into hanzi – it really ended up being one of the most exciting and interesting things about the language for me. You’d be surprised of the joy you can get by recognising the radicals and the interesting ways characters have been constructed and the pearls of wisdom they telegraph from a civilisation that spanned thousands of years…
Did you ever find a decent handwriting IME for the Nexus One?
I found this link: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=619373 but the link to the IME package no longer works…
Okay this is the baby you want: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=5403780&posted=1#post5403780
I installed this (1.03) and it worked, sort of. I just had a quick play with the full-screen mode. By default nothing appeared at all but full-screen worked. I assume there’s a way to make it work so the touch display isn’t full screen but it might not work. I can’t think why it would let me select the IME but nothing happens at all when tapping on a text entry box. Unfortunately even switching to the other IMEs really weird stuff happened and they didn’t work right so I had to uninstall it.
I’m still baffled why it would be better to obscure loads of your screen and sketch out 我 instead of just typing wo but it’s nifty there’s a working option assuming you don’t want the english keyboard to work…
What I’d really like right now is just to use the pinyin keyboard but have prediction work when it’s switched to english, like the regular english keyboard. Bah.
Thanks Mat. I actually already had that one installed but had forgotten about it, maybe because I thought it wasn’t working (portrait mode). Great that it supports Simp & Trad chars.
IMO, its not a great IME though because it just feels a bit buggy & rough around the edges. Still, a million times better than nothing!
Regarding Google Pinyin IME, has anyone figured out what’s the purpose of the 词 button?
PJ