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FAQ

What are the advantages over Pinyin?

I believe everyone is already very familiar with Pinyin input methods, so I won’t dwell on their strengths here — I will only discuss their shortcomings.

1) Slow single-character input

When Pinyin users are forced to input a single character, they usually type a word first and then delete the characters they don’t want; or they keep paging through candidates until they find that character. This works, but it is clumsy — something I personally find hard to accept, which is why I generally avoid using Pinyin.

2) Overall typing speed is slow

If Pinyin users want to increase their typing speed, they can switch to a double-Pinyin method such as Xiaohe Double-Pinyin (小鹤双拼). But double-Pinyin, like Wubi, also has a learning curve, so the vast majority of Pinyin users don’t use it. Moreover, double-Pinyin also has decomposition rules — it is a “phonetic-form” coding scheme. But I believe Chinese characters should be form-first, so a “form-phonetic” scheme should be adopted: form as the backbone, phonetic as the supplement. That is the right way.

For a web-novel writer to use Sogou Pinyin is a waste; if they switched to the Fengshui Input Method, they could write two books in the time it used to take to write one.

3) Forgetting how to write characters by hand

Nowadays people write with a pen less and less, and type more and more. When they are forced to write by hand, they often can’t produce even very simple characters. This is the drawback of Pinyin. Users of form-based input methods don’t have this problem — every character form lives in their mind.

4) Homophones cause chaos in the Chinese language

Sogou is currently the input method with the most users. Every time I see homophonic coinages like “鸭梨山大” or “亚力山大” (mangled spellings of “压力山大”), I know that Pinyin has once again dragged ignorant users into making trouble. These are not new words, let alone fashion — they are errors, and they only corrode the Chinese writing system.

Chinese characters are form-based writing, not phonetic writing. Letting Pinyin dominate runs counter to the historical tradition of Chinese characters and will inevitably cause confusion. The many homophonic misspellings are the concrete manifestation of that chaos.

5) Privacy leakage

When people use cloud dictionaries, their personal privacy is also leaking. You never know whether, as you type, someone is standing right behind you watching — and that is not a good feeling.

What are the advantages over Wubi?

I myself was once a ten-year user of 86 Wubi, so I know its strengths and weaknesses very well. Wubi’s biggest problems are several: the radicals are very hard to memorize, and the decomposition rules are unintuitive. I happened to memorize the Wubi radical table because, when I first learned keyboard typing, I was handed a few sheets of paper with the Wubi radical table and memorized it by accident. But memorizing the radicals doesn’t mean you can immediately type in Wubi. By chance I also had a dictionary on hand that listed the Wubi code next to every character, so I reverse-engineered the decomposition rules against the radical table and figured them out. In those early years there weren’t many choices, and Pinyin was still pretty bad, so choosing Wubi wasn’t a bad call — but it wasn’t a great one either. I do not recommend that anyone learn Wubi now, or any improved Wubi, because these individually-maintained input method schemes may be incomplete.

Some say “Wubi is not dead, only withering.” As a form-based method standing in opposition to Pinyin, Wubi will certainly not die — but the Wubi scheme is destined to become history. Wubi’s radical arrangement, final-stroke identification method, decomposition rules, dictionary, and so on are all less than excellent: both hard to learn and hard to use. That a ten-year Wubi user like me gave it up after a while tells you something.

After I read a number of different input method schemes, I realized that while each has its own character, none of them is good enough. Simplified Chinese deserves one truly excellent input method — and so the Fengshui Input Method was born.

The more radicals there are, the simpler decomposition becomes — but the more radicals, the more a beginner has to memorize, which is unfriendly to newcomers. So the Fengshui Input Method borrowed the layout ideas of “Modern Wubi” and alphabetic pictography to create the Fengshui radical table: although it has many radicals, they are very easy to remember.

Today, Pinyin is taught in the first grade of Chinese primary schools, but Pinyin itself is not without difficulty. For speakers in some dialect regions and for foreign friends, the Fengshui decomposition method may well be easier to learn than Pinyin.

The Fengshui Input Method uses three-tier, three-key simplified coding, together with a matching 150,000-word large dictionary — using it feels wonderfully smooth.

Who is the Fengshui Input Method for?

Pinyin and the Fengshui method are two legs: one person can master both at the same time, with no confusion whatsoever. Learning Chinese Pinyin helps children master the pronunciation of characters, while learning the Fengshui method at the same time helps them grasp character forms faster — walking on two legs is better.

I would actually advise against Wubi users learning the Fengshui method, because it will cause some confusion at first. But it won’t last long — a week or two is enough to fully overcome it. If you can accept short-term confusion and want to improve your typing, then the Fengshui Input Method will be the better choice.