I was under the impression that Wubi as designed mainly for simplified Chinese, but now that I actually read the article on Wikipedia, it says it’s for both, so I think I was wrong. I type both traditional and simplified, but used to type almost only traditional in grad school, so that’s why I considered Cangjie back then. I’ll need to look into Wubi more, I think. Probably still not worth it, but might be interesting. 🙂

I am Chinese but didn’t know “部首” is “radical” in English until I read your message. “Person radical” means “人字旁(部首)”. I DO learn something from this site. Thanks!

I watched a TV program many years ago. It had some people do some tests and found the method of typing Chinese characters on a computer with the fastest speed was Wubi Input (Five Strokes Input). Pinyin was the second. Cangjie was way behind the two. I guess it is still true at present. I think Cangjie is kinda another mission impossible for a non-native Chinese speaker to learn. You need to have the image or construction of the Chinese character in your mind before you can type it on a computer with Cangjie Input. Cangjie Input is mostly, if not only, used in the Traditional Chinese community — Taiwan and Hong Kong. Many people did try to learn Cangjie Input but failed. Those who find Cangjie Input easy to learn probably break Chinese characters in a way similar to that of the inventor of it. When looking up a Chinese word in a dictionary, we need to break it into components. If you break Chinese characters in a way very different to that of the inventor of Cangjie Input, there is fat chance of you mastering it.

I considered learning Cangjie a few years ago, because I wanted a method that would reinforce my knowledge of characters while also speeding up typing, but I never got around to do it. I’m not that scared of new keyboard layouts, considering that I’ve learnt to type with the Dvorak keyboard layout and have used it for more than a decade now. I can type Qwerty reasonably fast, too, so adding one more shouldn’t be all that hard. Obviously, Cangjie is completely different from just switching letters around, and I didn’t consider it worthwhile back then. I do occasionally feel an urge to learn it, but I’ve been able to fight it so far. 😀

Some learners of Chinese can not only write both Traditional and Simplified Characters, but also type on a computer with Cangjie Input and Pinyin Input. That’s really impressive. I use only Cangjie Input and cannot master Pinyin Input as I am not a native Putonghua speaker. I’m planning to take a class on Putonghua pronunciation in a couple months. Hopefully, the COVID-19 pandemic will settle down by then. The class focuses on the four tones of Putonghua among which we Hongkongers often can’t tell the difference.

Hi! It’s time consuming, but certainly not impossible. 🙂

I doubt your Chinese level is advanced if you still confuse 俩 and 辆

I think drawing such diagrams is great for sorting out issues, which is what you’re doing. These will help you sort out which is which and create good mnemonics for them.

The risk I’m talking about is if you learn several words meaning roughly the same thing at the same time, or several sounds that sound almost the same. The principle “what fires together, wires together” has some truth to it, so if you learn similar words together, they will be harder to distinguish later (there’s plenty of empirical evidence for this; check e.g. Paul Nation’s Learning Vocabulary in another Language). While I haven’t seen any study about this, think about mixing up left and right, up and down, words for fruit and so on.

So, learning one extra character this way is not really a problem, I wrote that bit because I don’t want people to start drawing diagrams like you describe for learning new characters, like: “Today I’m going to learn ten characters that contain 莫”. But that’s not what you propose, so I’d say it’s certainly okay to learn 摸. It’s also quite common!

It’s HSK5 and Hanzicraft’s 1365th most frequent character, not on my current todo list, but not far away. So I tend to put it on my (still not drawn) mo-莫-characters diagram.

Two characters I currently mixed (or learned at the same time) are 传 and 转. They were on the list with 专 too, so I draw a 专-Diagram with the total set hanzicraft gave me,专传转砖抟, with 砖抟 not to learn, but to distinguish.