http://www.eon.com.hk/download/HandWritingIME_1.0.apk

It doesn’t seem to be on the Market, but it’s well worth a try.

PJ

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!

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.

I found this link: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=619373 but the link to the IME package no longer works…

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…

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.

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