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Haraksha posted:Ah, so you were in Shida. I'm so used to calling it that that I forget the actual name is NTNU. My mistake. That makes it even more baffling that the professors wanted you to learn zhuyin. When I was there 5 years ago, the first teacher I had made us write the characters, pinyin and zhuyin on all the homework and tests up until the 5th chapter. After that, we could choose which to use, pinyin or zhuyin. Was never a problem just using pinyin after that.
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Jan 21, 2013 03:30
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Ravendas posted:When I was there 5 years ago, the first teacher I had made us write the characters, pinyin and zhuyin on all the homework and tests up until the 5th chapter. After that, we could choose which to use, pinyin or zhuyin. That sounds like an annoying amount of extra busy work.
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Jan 21, 2013 04:13
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blinkyzero posted:Interesting anecdote about Shida students, Mook. I've read a few blogs from people who went there and they say that the intensive courses have far fewer people just screwing around. I'll do some more digging and definitely check out those other programs. TaiDa's regular courses are the same as the "intensive" courses at shida, ie 15 in class hours a week. Basically you need to study 15 hours a week to fulfill the visa requirement. ShiDa skirts around this by offering a "regular course" that is 10 hours a week + 5 hours of "self study" or optional classes that nobody does.
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Jan 21, 2013 08:15
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duckfarts posted:RE: zhuyin/pinyin talk - zhuyin can be nice because it takes you completely out of western script because people are loving horrible about pronouncing words as they read them instead of for what sounds they're supposed to represent(like people with Japanese, which is the easiest loving thing and yet it's somehow difficult for people to not sound like poo poo?), and I suppose you could use a bunch of local teaching books and readers(way more readers). Also, it's useful for typing when using other people's computers without having to change settings on them. For accelerated study at the adult level though, I do think pinyin would be much faster, especially for starting out. How you write has nothing (well very little) to do with how well you pronounce words. If you can't learn to say words correctly then writing in pinyin or zhuyin isn't going to make a difference. You should be learning how to pronounce based on listening and 1on1 with native speakers, and then just associating it with the pinyin. Admittedly though for really uncommon words I will forget how to write the pinyin or incorrectly pronounce for it a second.
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Jan 21, 2013 08:19
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Taiwan sure is a nice place to live, but costs wise isn't it much cheaper to learn Mandarin in the mainland  You also get to learn the 'h' syllable  Mook posted:How do you even use google docs in mainland china? I was just there and had all sorts of issues connecting. It's slow but still fine. China hates google services but not black list like drop box. Goons could play civ5 and all. Here's the steam group http://steamcommunity.com/groups/chinagoons Haraksha posted:What? The whole point of zhuyin and pinyin is to provide phonetic spelling for words so that you can know how to pronounce them fairly accurately without having heard or seen the word/character before. Yes, your pronunciation is greatly improved through working with native speakers and trying to copy their pronunciation, but pinyin or zhuyin are perfectly acceptable ways to start learning to read and pronounce the words. Dare I add, that with standardized pinyin romanization and adding IPA pronunciation makes reading/learning easier. Not advocating complete romanization but with a standard pronunciation system there is a lot less confusion in how words of pronounced. Cantonese is in a linguistics landmine and no one really knows what they are talking about when it comes to "n" "l" and sometimes "h" "f" sounds. Younger kids think I'm a dirty immigrant when I actually speak "proper" Cantonese 
caberham fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Jan 21, 2013 |
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Jan 21, 2013 08:42
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Mook posted:How you write has nothing (well very little) to do with how well you pronounce words. If you can't learn to say words correctly then writing in pinyin or zhuyin isn't going to make a difference. You should be learning how to pronounce based on listening and 1on1 with native speakers, and then just associating it with the pinyin. Admittedly though for really uncommon words I will forget how to write the pinyin or incorrectly pronounce for it a second. What? The whole point of zhuyin and pinyin is to provide phonetic spelling for words so that you can know how to pronounce them fairly accurately without having heard or seen the word/character before. Yes, your pronunciation is greatly improved through working with native speakers and trying to copy their pronunciation, but pinyin or zhuyin are perfectly acceptable ways to start learning to read and pronounce the words.
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Jan 21, 2013 08:56
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I think that by removing romanized characters altogether and forcing you to learn a foreign script, you won't have the issue of "reading the sound wrong" so much because you have to learn a fresh set of characters with specific sounds. Also, I think tones are pretty integral to the system too, whereas they are often ignored in pinyin. It also pushes you into a pure language environment where you don't have English script to fall back on, which is a big thing(and major sticking point) for learning how to read.
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Jan 21, 2013 14:09
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duckfarts posted:I think that by removing romanized characters altogether and forcing you to learn a foreign script, you won't have the issue of "reading the sound wrong" so much because you have to learn a fresh set of characters with specific sounds. Also, I think tones are pretty integral to the system too, whereas they are often ignored in pinyin. It also pushes you into a pure language environment where you don't have English script to fall back on, which is a big thing(and major sticking point) for learning how to read. I don't disagree with that at all and was only disagreeing with the guy saying zhuyin/pinyin have nothing to do with how you read a word when they actually represent exactly how you read the word. I've learned foreign scripts before, but they didn't necessarily help my pronunciation. The problem is the sounds that exist in that language but not in English or are near to sounds that exist in English but are not identical. So, while I might get closer with zhuyin (not screwing up wu and yu or lu and lv), it's still not going to be exact.
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Jan 21, 2013 14:19
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I learned pinyin first and I found zhuyin helpful -sometimes it clarifies the vowels in ways pinyin does not -easier to recall tones However, the downside is that if you can read Japanese hiragana and Korean hangul too, one gets to the point where the same squigglies mean multiple sounds in a way that is inconvenient.
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Jan 21, 2013 15:22
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What's the best program for someone who just wants to get some basic, survival level Chinese under their belt? I'd like to be able to go to a restaurant or the gas station and not have to point like some tourist.
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Jan 21, 2013 15:29
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Buy a copy of "Remembering Traditional Hanzi" books 1 and 2 and Far Eastern Everyday Chinese Book 1. Self study the characters and get a Chinese speaking friend to take you through the first couple of chapters of book 1. Use Anki to practice flashcards every day. You'll be able to ramble on about the size of your friend's penis and their inadequacies in bed in no time.
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Jan 21, 2013 15:48
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Pimsleur CDs are the bar-none the fastest way I know of(listening/speaking only), but their accent is super mainland, so you may want to try your lines on a patient local friend with a good sense of humor first.
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Jan 21, 2013 17:17
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duckfarts posted:My guess based on the color is Jeans Bar Cafe, ... That's the one! Thanks!
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Jan 21, 2013 22:07
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Moon Slayer posted:What's the best program for someone who just wants to get some basic, survival level Chinese under their belt? I'd like to be able to go to a restaurant or the gas station and not have to point like some tourist. At least this will help you to identify and learn the names of several dishes you'd typically order in a restaurant. Honestly, my reading kinda sucks so if I went to a restaurant alone or with a few other laowai we'd typically just order things from memory rather than actually read the menu.
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Jan 22, 2013 03:58
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If you want to be super lazy, just look for the dish with 丁 at the end because it's like the easiest character to remember and you'll end up with a plate of Kung Pao chicken.
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Jan 22, 2013 05:18
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Haraksha posted:What? The whole point of zhuyin and pinyin is to provide phonetic spelling for words so that you can know how to pronounce them fairly accurately without having heard or seen the word/character before. Yes, your pronunciation is greatly improved through working with native speakers and trying to copy their pronunciation, but pinyin or zhuyin are perfectly acceptable ways to start learning to read and pronounce the words. Yes but you have to learn how to speak the sounds represented by pinyin by hearing the correct pronunciation first. Nobody can pick up a book for the first time and read pinyin and sound intelligible at all. If you just look at 是 or SHI for the first time you're going to say something that sounds like "SHE" instead of "SHHURR". My point is the actual pinyin or zhuyin symbol for the sound doesn't matter (in regards to divorcing yourself from the english pronunciation) because you should be associating to the new chinese way of pronouncing the words. I realize there are a lot of different ways to learn chinese and this is only my opinion. My chinese is pretty good though.
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Jan 22, 2013 07:29
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Mook posted:Nobody can pick up a book for the first time and read pinyin and sound intelligible at all. If you just look at 是 or SHI for the first time you're going to say something that sounds like "SHE" instead of "SHHURR". True. Or if you're some of my classmates of courses past, you can pick up a book for an entire semester and 是/設/系 will still sound the same yet amazingly all still wrong.  Also, for anyone taking Haraksha's advice with the 丁, be careful. There could be more than one on the menu, and you might be getting diced anything.
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Jan 22, 2013 08:19
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Well, there's usually only one and you can just clarify "Gung Bao Ji Ding ma?" to make sure you're getting it right. Edit: Though I guess you might get orange juice? I was just talking to my girlfriend about it and she said while it does mean "diced", they don't usually apply it to anything but chicken. Atlas Hugged fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Jan 22, 2013 |
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Jan 22, 2013 08:21
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My cheap-rear end boss told me just yesterday that I am getting only eight hours a week until Chinese New Year.   If anybody knows about any short term work in Taipei City during the next three or so weeks, drop me a line, please. I'll take pretty much anything before 1pm and after 5pm, or any time of day on weekends and Tuesdays. Can't wait to start looking for something more stable after my contract is up.
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Jan 22, 2013 08:34
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I've never tried to learn zhuyin or even casually looked at how I might go about doing so, but wouldn't you start with an explanation of how to read each character that would inevitably have to be romanized in some way therefore eliminating that idea that you're divorcing yourself from romanization?
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Jan 22, 2013 09:20
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Bloodnose posted:I've never tried to learn zhuyin or even casually looked at how I might go about doing so, but wouldn't you start with an explanation of how to read each character that would inevitably have to be romanized in some way therefore eliminating that idea that you're divorcing yourself from romanization? Let's assume we're starting from 0 level Chinese ability. A teacher is most likely going to introduce a handful of things during the first days and weeks of the class. They'll show you a handful of basic characters (是,有,我,你,錢,的, etc), tell you how to write them in Chinese and how to pronounce them, and then begin breaking down either zhuyin or pinyin. They'll use those first characters as examples to help the rules of whichever phonetic system they choose to go with. I don't have zhuyin installed on this computer and I don't know how to read it, so my next examples will be with pinyin. They'll list all of the pinyin consonants and vowels. When they show each letter, they'll tell you how that letter is pronounced in the pinyin scheme. Some letters have identical pronunciations to their English counterparts (for example "s"), while others differ dramatically (for example, "c"). The idea here being that when the teacher tells you that a pinyin "c" is pronounced most like a "ts" than a "k", you should only associate the "ts" sound with it when reading pinyin. Now, if students are learning zhuyin, they simply have to learn to read again. They have to memorize all of the symbols. They have to memorize all of the sounds and associate them with the symbols. And then they have to learn how to properly combine the symbols, which pairs are possible, and which aren't. The difficultly with pinyin is that all of the letters are the same as the English ones, but often times the sounds are entirely different. So, even though I have been told that "cao" sounds like "tsao", I still might read it as "cow" because I associate that pinyin "c" with the English "k" sound. The major advantage is that I don't have to learn how to make new squiggles and I'm actually mostly learning the differences between the pronunciations since so many letters have the same sound in both scripts. Now, I'm sure you know all of this, so I'll get to your actual question. You don't have to associate zhuyin with English letters at all. There are multiple ways to teach it without relying on English equivalents. Remember, people learn to read at all ages in life and do so without a prior alphabet to fall back on. In fact, it's likely better to learn zhuyin without associating it with English letters. I had students in Korea try to do this between English letters and Hangul and the results were messy at best. You'd have one Hangul character substituted for at least two English letters (there's no "f" in Korean, so they substitute it and "p" with the same character). If you really want to associate zhuyin with another phonetic alphabet, that's what IPA is for. Otherwise, you just have to rely on your ear and your memory like a child learning to read for the first time does. However, thanks to the internet and language CDs, this is fairly simple to do for an adult.
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Jan 22, 2013 09:44
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Bloodnose posted:I've never tried to learn zhuyin or even casually looked at how I might go about doing so, but wouldn't you start with an explanation of how to read each character that would inevitably have to be romanized in some way therefore eliminating that idea that you're divorcing yourself from romanization? E: holy poo poo maybe I should've read Haraksha's reply first.
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Jan 22, 2013 14:43
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It really does seem like Hanyu pinyin just sucks in easily fixable ways though. English has dozens of graphemes (which is why it's such a pain in the rear end to teach a lot of the time), and I don't know why Hanyu only uses like 10 of them. Why "ni" and "shi", and not "nee" and "shuh" or "shur"? Why "cao" and not "tsao"? How many different phonemes in that whole fuzzy palatal/alveolar region are assigned randomly to "x" or "sh" or "j" or "ch" or "q" or "zh"? Like 3 or 4? Why is "k" sometimes voiced and sometimes not? It's not like English orthography doesn't have the tools to distinguish between different phonemes and assign novel graphemes to phonemes that don't exist in English, but Hanyu is really all over the map as far as what sounds are attributed to what graphemes and when. In other words, I don't think romanization is in and of itself a bad idea, but Hanyu seems like it was concocted in a boardroom somewhere by a bunch of drunk imperialists. I'm not too familiar with other romanization systems, but are they all as ambiguous as Hanyu pinyin? My limited experience with Tongyong tells me it sure does seem a little bit better. quadrophrenic fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Jan 22, 2013 |
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Jan 22, 2013 15:07
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When I first took classes, we spent the first two weeks (about 10 hours of class time total) just going over the pinyin alphabet and how each part sounds, and going over how to say each sound in every tone. We didn't learn how to read or write any characters until lesson 6 (about 2 months in.) But this is primarily a conversation-based curriculum. I mean, I can kind of read around 100 characters now, but I've been really sloppy on writing them.
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Jan 22, 2013 15:15
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Tongyong Pinyin is ridiculous, childish horseshit that exists for exactly one reason: "Everyone else uses Hanyu Pinyin but we can't because Communists." Also don't confuse romanization with "the English alphabet." IIRC, at least some of HYPY is actually Russian in origin, hence the zh, for example. The important thing to remember is that no romanization is going to be perfect, because they're all approximations.
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Jan 22, 2013 15:27
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At least Tongyong makes more sense to the native English speaker because they don't make "e" and "i" all wacky and arbitrary like Hanyu does. I guess my point is that romanization systems aren't going to be perfect, but there's a lot you can do with Latin alphabet orthography that Hanyu pinyin does not do that would make Chinese phonology a lot more approachable to westerners. I mean, ultimately you're right. The best way to learn how to pronounce Chinese is to learn it from a native Chinese speaker, I suppose, no matter if you're learning it from pinyin or WG or bopomofo or hanzi. I think that can be said about any language with a non-Latin script, and most languages with Latin scripts. Speaking of which, I start actual Chinese classes in a week so pretty soon I can talk a little less out of my rear end about these sorts of things, hurray! Anyone done or know anyone who's done classes through Taiwan Mandarin Institute? Thoughts?
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Jan 22, 2013 15:36
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quadrophrenic posted:It really does seem like Hanyu pinyin just sucks in easily fixable ways though. English has dozens of graphemes (which is why it's such a pain in the rear end to teach a lot of the time), and I don't know why Hanyu only uses like 10 of them. Why "ni" and "shi", and not "nee" and "shuh" or "shur"? Why "cao" and not "tsao"? How many different phonemes in that whole fuzzy palatal/alveolar region are assigned randomly to "x" or "sh" or "j" or "ch" or "q" or "zh"? Like 3 or 4? Why is "k" sometimes voiced and sometimes not? It's not like English orthography doesn't have the tools to distinguish between different phonemes and assign novel graphemes to phonemes that don't exist in English, but Hanyu is really all over the map as far as what sounds are attributed to what graphemes and when. In other words, I don't think romanization is in and of itself a bad idea, but Hanyu seems like it was concocted in a boardroom somewhere by a bunch of drunk imperialists. Well, there's a handful of problems. Wade-Giles gets a bad rap in some circles, but I've been told on multiple occasions that if you speak absolutely no Chinese, you actually stand a better chance of saying the word correctly when using WG than if you've never read HYPY before and try to read a word phonetically from it. For instance, lots of video game fans in America think Cow Cow is a super cool warrior. WG has a lot of the spelling conventions that you brought up. The problem is that it's messy for the reason I mentioned in my previous post. People become far too dependent on trying to mash Chinese sounds into "conventional" English spelling rules. Second, HYPY was designed with the specific idea of simplicity to spread literacy to as many people as possible in mind. This is possibly why you get one letter standing in for multiple sounds under different circumstances. However, the rules really aren't arbitrary. The letter "i" is voiced as an "ee" sound when it follows the consonants "b", "d", "j", "l", "m", "n", "p", "q", "t", "x", and just as an "ee" following "y". I don't really know the technical words, but if "i" follows anything else, you basically just make the consonant sound without a real vowel sound. I could be wrong on this, but the major difference between q and ch, j and zh, and x and sh is that the h indicates that the consonant is further back or higher up in the mouth. Again, I apologize for my lack of better terminology. Basically, q, x, and j are all in the same spot in the mouth while ch, sh, and zh are all in the same spot. That h is there to keep them all grouped together. Why use a "c" instead of a "ts"? Well, because you only need one "k" and it's easier to remember one letter than two. If you've got "ts" and "tz", why bother with the "t" in the "tz"? There's no independent "z". Then it makes sense to keep it uniform, but you can't just use "s", so you have to pick another letter that's not being used for anything. Thus, "c" gets assigned that sound. You also have to take into account accents, both Chinese and English. You'll notice that HYPY vowels are the most different from their English counter-parts. A large part of this has to do with how vowels are where most of the big differences in pronunciation come from. You wanting to represent vowels with combinations including "h"s or doubling up vowels is just as arbitrary as assigning a vowel two different sounds based on the preceding consonant. Either way, you're going to have to ignore your English speaking instinct and just remember what that letter means in any given circumstance. GoutPatrol posted:When I first took classes, we spent the first two weeks (about 10 hours of class time total) just going over the pinyin alphabet and how each part sounds, and going over how to say each sound in every tone. We didn't learn how to read or write any characters until lesson 6 (about 2 months in.) But this is primarily a conversation-based curriculum. I mean, I can kind of read around 100 characters now, but I've been really sloppy on writing them. I'm really down on people who don't go to the trouble of learning the writing system because there are lots of effective ways to learn it and it makes life so much easier once you've got it under your belt. I guess if you just don't care, that's your business and you're free to do or not do whatever you want, but if you have any interest in it at all, I strongly recommend the Heizig "Remembering Traditional Hanzi" books.
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Jan 22, 2013 15:58
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Haraksha posted:Well, there's a handful of problems. Wade-Giles gets a bad rap in some circles, but I've been told on multiple occasions that if you speak absolutely no Chinese, you actually stand a better chance of saying the word correctly when using WG than if you've never read HYPY before and try to read a word phonetically from it. I doubt it, 淡水 TAMSUI/Danshui and 高雄 KAOHSIUNG/Gaoxiong come to mind as particularly aggreious examples of terrible wade gils (from someone that didn't know either system). I always have friends saying telling me they're coming to taiwan to visit "COWSEEUNG". Hanyu Pinyin seems really stupid at times, but it's not easy to romanize any language and I know I couldn't do anything better. I do think there could be an improved system for dealing with tones and special umlautt characters so i don't have to type nv to get 女 and every street sign wouldn't just omit the tones because theres no easy way to print them.
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Jan 22, 2013 19:10
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Haraksha posted:Well, there's usually only one and you can just clarify "Gung Bao Ji Ding ma?" to make sure you're getting it right. 宮保雞丁 gong not gung, pinyin expert :p
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Jan 22, 2013 19:16
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Mook posted:I doubt it, 淡水 TAMSUI/Danshui and 高雄 KAOHSIUNG/Gaoxiong come to mind as particularly aggreious examples of terrible wade gils (from someone that didn't know either system). I always have friends saying telling me they're coming to taiwan to visit "COWSEEUNG". And as for mispronunciations, that's not even necessarily a romanization thing. Just ask anyone from Te Puke, Waggawagga, Schuylkill, Leicestershire.... sub supau fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Jan 22, 2013 |
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Jan 22, 2013 20:41
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Mook posted:宮保雞丁 gong not gung, pinyin expert :p Sorry, I was typing in a hurry. But, you're right about the tones. I was having this conversation with Tetsuo not too long ago. The answer seems to be the inclusion of a new mutable letter that can be added to the end of a word rather than modifying one of the vowels in the center. Pinyin was certainly created from the mindset of a person who would be handwriting it. In that case, added accents and umlauts is perfectly fine. However, I find Google Pinyin on a tablet to be the most effective way to type Chinese. Yes, I still have to type "v" instead of "u + umlat", but it's pretty good at giving me the most likely compounds based on what I've typed. On rare occasions, I have to go character hunting, but the tablet screen and Android make reading Traditional characters incredibly easy. I think the Hs in Kaohsiung is supposed to represent the X in Pinyin. I guess they figured that inverting the letters was supposed to clue you in to the proper way to say it. Who the gently caress knows? Either way, a lot of cities in Taiwan keep their older spellings just for the sake of tradition. Hell, Taipei isn't even technically spelled correctly and foreigners pronounce it differently than Taiwanese people do because of the drat "p". But as Tetsuo said, Tamsui is a really bad example.
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Jan 23, 2013 02:00
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The "tones are hard to type" and "umlauts " things are hella Anglocentric. They're not hard to type, they're hard to type on English keyboards. Germans and Swedes use umlauts all the time without trouble, and Taiwanese manage to type tone markers in Zhuyin on the regular. poo poo, people even manage to type Vietnamese, and that poo poo has diacritics out the rear end. And ease of typing doesn't mean poo poo either - when WG was the romanization system of choice, people consistently hosed that up too, dropping easy - and crucial - stuff like apostrophes, making distinguishing voiced and unvoiced initials essentially impossible at times (e.g. "cheng" and "ch'eng", "zheng" and "cheng" in HYPY, merging into "cheng").
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Jan 23, 2013 06:02
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Well, that's basically what I was going to say. There's not really a keyboard specifically design for Pinyin that I know of. If there is, I'd be curious to see it. The most elegant solution that I could come up with was a letter tacked onto the end of the word that had the tone above it so you'd only need to add/replace four keys on a standard keyboard, or use a simple command like alt+1,2,3, or 4. Hell, if the command was that simple, you wouldn't even need a new letter. After typing the word you wanted, you'd just hit the tone command button and whatever tone you wanted and it would automatically add the tone marker to the appropriate vowel.
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Jan 23, 2013 06:09
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If you're just typing, usually you can just type the tone number, so "zhong1" will get you 中, "zhong3" will get you 種, etc. Now why there are so few programs around that aren't dictionary-focused that will just let you pump out "zhōng" without at least minor inconvenience I do not understand. poo poo, just to do that I had to copy-paste from Wenlin. I guess there are probably more that actually will let you do that, just not in Taiwan because, again, loving Communists gently caress them.
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Jan 23, 2013 06:35
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Trying to make a keyboard layout, will update later on success or failure.
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Jan 23, 2013 07:25
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I should clarify, I find using pinyin to type characters super simple for the reason you said. I have a bitch of a time writing in pinyin with the intent of displaying pinyin with the tones.
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Jan 23, 2013 08:02
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Haraksha posted:Well, that's basically what I was going to say. There's not really a keyboard specifically design for Pinyin that I know of. If there is, I'd be curious to see it. The most elegant solution that I could come up with was a letter tacked onto the end of the word that had the tone above it so you'd only need to add/replace four keys on a standard keyboard, or use a simple command like alt+1,2,3, or 4. Hell, if the command was that simple, you wouldn't even need a new letter. After typing the word you wanted, you'd just hit the tone command button and whatever tone you wanted and it would automatically add the tone marker to the appropriate vowel. xià zài Pinyinput! It's a windows IME that just lets you type pinyin with tone marks. It's useful for making flash cards or talking about Chinese with other learners. The download page has a pay-what-you-want thing. You can opt to pay nothing and still download it. What I really hate about the pinyin IME for Windows is that there is no way to use tones to narrow the selection of characters like with zhuyin, so often the character you want to type is several pages down on the list. Tpying with zhuyin is so much faster once you learn the keyboard layout. PS: Still looking for work
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Jan 23, 2013 09:29
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I thought with the Windows IME you would type the pinyin and then hit the tone number and it would generate a most likely character, but you could then hit the arrow key and it would generate a list of other possible characters at the same tone. Is that not the case?
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Jan 23, 2013 09:50
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Oz_Bonus posted:What I really hate about the pinyin IME for Windows is that there is no way to use tones to narrow the selection of characters like with zhuyin
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Jan 23, 2013 10:00
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OK kids, try this poo poo I whipped up: US-International-Pinyin Keyboard (for Windows-havers) It's a modification of the US-International keyboard, which lets you do stuff like accents by using dead keys, where you press a key first, then a letter, then the "fixed" letter poops out. Set it alongside your normal keyboard, and Ctrl-Shift should switch between them(you can change the icon look so you can tell which keyboard you're using). Also, may gently caress up if the program you're using isn't unicode-friendly. First:
Hǎo bù hǎo? I didn't use 1/2/3/4 or anything like that because I wanted it to co-exist on top of the existing International keyboard, which is pretty useful for typing stuff like café or mañana. Don't forget you can Ctrl-Shift to revert to your normal keyboard if the dead key thing starts pissing you off.
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Jan 23, 2013 12:55
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