
Neural Pinyin-to-Chinese Character Converter - kyubyong
https://github.com/Kyubyong/neural_chinese_transliterator
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devy
While this is a cool research project to learn Tensorflow, it's no where near
the competition. All Apple iOS / Microsoft Windows / Google Android's stock
pinyin input methods has more or less an AI component to automatically predict
the Chinese characters on the fly while you type - they work extremely well.
There are a about close to a hundred other Chinese input method vendors in the
market right now other than the top 3 tech companies' stock Chinese input
methods. Leading the bunch is a company called iFlytek[1], which utilize voice
recognition AI to improve input speed.

And yes I am a native speaker and use pinyin on a daily basis.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFlytek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFlytek)

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peterburkimsher
I made my own Chinese keyboard that uses the visual glyphs instead of the
pinyin pronunciation. You can decompose and rebuild characters from their
parts.

[https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io)

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anarbadalov
not that this would actually help anyone in need of a transliterator, but
probably of interest: mit press is publishing a book later this fall on how
Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation
for China’s information technology successes. full disclosure: i used to work
at the press. got to read some of the manuscript, and it was indeed
fascinating: [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chinese-
typewriter](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chinese-typewriter)

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matthewrudy
This is very interesting.

I tried to use swiftkey chinese beta many years ago, but couldn't accept it
because it only allowed pinyin input with simplified characters.

Currently I use Google Zhuyin keyboard (which also has a pinyin mode) which
does pretty accurate prediction and has a unified interface with my cantonese
(yale) and korean keyboards.

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edent
That's really cool! I got very frustrated with SwiftKey when I tried to use it
to text my Chinese friends.

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sheepdestroyer
Aren't these non phonetic writing systems a great time loss in general? Still
wondering if Japan/China/similar would not get a great economical boost from
ditching their non decipherable ideograms. Just thinking of the time those
poor students spend remembering them instead of learning useful
math/history/foreign_language just pains me.

~~~
titanix2
Why would these people change to a phonetic writing system when most of the
world's isn't? English for example is a morpho-phonemic one. The Chinese
writing is also more resilient to language change, and given proper education,
texts from millenia can still be read.

If you look at the PISA scores[1] for example, the top 10 includes Singapore,
Japan, Taiwan, Macao and Honk-Kong. So the Chinese script and its derivatives
is clearly not impairing its users to learn maths.

On the foreign language side, it's even a boon because someone knowing a CJK
language wanting to learn another one can rely on a lot of words with shared
roots to learn it faster. But as the phonology of these language is different,
the knowledge of the Chinese characters can help connects the dots between
words, which aren't obviously related when romanized.

[1] [https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in-
focus.pdf](https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in-focus.pdf)

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Why would these people change to a phonetic writing system when most of the
> world's isn't? English for example is a morpho-phonemic one.

This isn't some binary category where you have or haven't achieved holiness.
Compared to Chinese, English is indistinguishable from a purely phonetic
script.

~~~
titanix2
This is still wrong. First, because English taken for itself is nowhere near a
phonetic script. It uses a lot of graphemes to represent the phonemes of the
language and there is no bijection between the two sets (as expected for a
phonetic system). In the end, the number of combinations to memorize for
reading perfectly is probably in the hundred or multiple hundreds.

French has the same problem. It takes years to train natives to write to
perfection; and the non-phonetic nature of the script bites hard the foreign
learners.

Second, at its core the Chinese writing evolved from a limited set of symbols
to represent syllabes. The current system is still mainly based on it and the
knowledge of around 400 components can help read and memorize of lot more
characters. The phonetic nature of the Chinese script is not apparent to
people who doesn't studied it, but it exists.

~~~
thaumasiotes
The phonetic nature of the Chinese script is so weak that in the foreword to
[https://www.amazon.com/Xunzi-Complete-
Text/dp/0691169314/](https://www.amazon.com/Xunzi-Complete-
Text/dp/0691169314/) , the author observes that while he uses his own
translations, he is forced to defer to existing scholarship as to what parts
of the text rhyme, not being qualified to determine that for himself.

