There’s something broken in the theme I’m using and I haven’t been able to fix it, so it’s not your problem! Sorry about that!

*Unfortunate I’m not able to comment in your guy’s comment thread. I’ve noticed this every time I’ve commented. Is this an issue for others? I’m in Safari but when I tried with Chrome it’s the same. Maybe it’s a plugin/extension issue if it’s just me experiencing this.

Majoring in Chinese in the U.S. in the early 1970s, I learned Zhuyin in a third-year course that covered miscellany from oracle-bone forms to simplified characters and Hanyu Pinyin. It came in handy when the first good dictionary since Mathews’ came out — the Wade-Giles index had errors but the Zhuyin index was excellent.

The order of the symbols in Zhuyin is based on linguistic principles, and their placement on the keyboard mostly follows that order. If one can touch-type English and knows the Zhuyin symbols, it is a joy to use right from the beginning (well, it WAS until they screwed it up by making it “intelligent”).

Thank you for sharing! This is very interesting indeed, but I do find the mix of similarity with English letters and actual components a bit confusing; maybe it makes more sense when you get into it more. It would be interesting to take a deeper dive into different non-phonetic typing systems, but it almost requires personal experience to say much about them from a learner perspective, which isn’t something I really have time to do. That makes comments like yours even more valuable, so thank you again for sharing!

Boshiamy is somewhat similar to Cangjie, but has optional shortcuts rather than having to always type the full sequence. According to some sources on the internet, that allows Boshiamy to have the average combination code length of 2.5 compared to Cangjie’s 4.5, and for that reason consistently wins at speed typing competitions. Cangjie differs a lot between operating systems and versions, while Boshiamy seems fairly consistent from what I’ve seen so far. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, many keyboards come with Cangjie symbols printed on them, but that’s not really needed for Boshiamy and you can use any QWERTY keyboard, as most components are more or less logically assigned to a latin letter.

The main drawback of Boshiamy is that it’s a proprietary product, even though the codes can be found for free and used with ibus. Also, some codes are loosely based on components’ Mandarin or Taiwanese pronunciations, or their meanings in English, which can be confusing/undesirable for some people, but for me is quite interesting. Compared to Cangjie, there are more overlapping codes and more characters that share the same code, but that doesn’t seem difficult to get used to.

Some examples:
哈 (OAO) components look like letters O A O
陪 (BLO) 阝 and 口 look like B and O, 立 is from “li”
掰 (HBDH) 手 means Hand, 八 and 刀 are pronounced “ba” and “dao”
了 (WI) the character looks like W from an angle, I is just a filler representing the last stroke because the code is shorter than three characters
三 (S) numbers 1-10, as well as some other most common characters like 的, have one letter codes

The IME’s logic is not hard to learn, the hardest thing is remembering the letter assignments of all the components as they don’t always make obvious sense. The official website offers a lot of practice material, however it’s all in Chinese, so it might not be very accessible to people who don’t have an advanced command of the language. If you do feel up for a challenge, however, I’d wholeheartedly recommend it.

Your comment highlights something I didn’t really go into much in the article, namely that typing on phones is obviously much slower than on computers, especially for some people. I can type at 120 words per minute in English, and while it’s hard to compare, I can easily type Chinese at above 100 characters per minute even with a fairly bad input method. That is clearly not possible when writing by hand (that’s almost two Chinese characters a second).

However, on a phone, this is quite different. I don’t type very fast at all, so the step to handwriting is actually much smaller, and could be, at least in some cases like you say, even be faster! I’ll add a comment to this effect in the article, as I think it’s something I should have mentioned, but didn’t. Thank you!