Android Chinese IME keyboards revisited

Since there’s few enough people talking about these, I seem to get a few people commenting based on organic search. There’s been some notable developments in terms of Chinese-capable IMEs on Android of late and I thought I’d kick out an update on those.

First of all, Google has been updating their default Android English/European keyboard and the Chinese pinyin keyboard. Google pinyin has a button to fast switch to English but there’s no way of getting back. Fortunately Smart Keyboard Pro added Chinese recently. This has a simple iPhone-like button to switch between any languages you have enabled. Finally we have a one-button switch between English and Chinese.

The English keyboard is very good, at least as good as Android’s default keyboard although you may need to get in and change some settings like getting auto capitalisation and training full stops/spaces to work etc. The Chinese keyboard seemed as competent as Google pinyin although of course it doesn’t have the sync to cloud stuff.

Mark Carter, the guy behind the Hanping dictionary on Android, prompted me to take a fresh look at the handwriting IMEs. Now I don’t think these sorts of IMEs are useful for non-native speakers, as a rule, because we tend not to be super fast at sketching hanzi and quite experienced with pinyin.

However one app really surprised me, gPen. It’s available in traditional and simplified variants. When you run it you get a large qwerty keyboard with an animated advert on the top. Oh oh! And it makes horrific tones out of the box, so you hit the settings and they’re all in Chinese which is going to prove problematic for some.

However… once I turned the tones off and dialled up the time I had to write a character (increased the delay allowable before the IME goes with what I’ve written), I found it very good! What you do is sketch on top of the qwerty keyboard, it’s genius really. So you can tap out stuff in English if you want, or sketch out characters.

At first I was painstakingly drawing characters with limited success but later on I just scribbled them and it seemed to work better somehow, not sure why that is. It looks like it’s stroke order sensitive, which is fine if you’ve been religious about stroke order when you learned characters like I have been. Maybe that’s the extra information it needs to work so well even on messy scribbles?

Now I’m not sure I’d actually use gPen much because I find the Smart Keyboard Pro option much more useful for me. However the IME is so good that it’s absolutely useful in terms of sketching a character you don’t know into a dictionary.

It may also be worth mentioning an app called Hanzi Recognizer. This is a standalone full screen app which allows you to sketch out a character and get a list of candidates and CE-DICT entries for them. It’s free so I suppose I should try be nice, but it’s hard having been spoiled by Pleco’s recognizer. You need to finish writing something and then hit recognize. It also seems to put odd stroke labels on what you’re sketching, as if you’re certain about those on a character you don’t know… still anyway, it seems useful in light of no other Android apps like this.