Tried this for awhile with my girlfriend who speaks Mandarin as her first language. It does seem to be slightly too picky, often calling my pronunciation third tongue when it should be one of the others, despite her saying it was perfectly fine to her ear. But on the other hand it called her pronunciation perfect all but one time, which seems pretty encouraging.
I'm a guy, and it called all of my tones "3rd tone" when said in my normal voice, but when I spoke in a cartoonishly high falsetto, it gave me perfect marks.
He's saying they _can_. If you can make the case that foreign countries can influence elections via social media platforms, how much more then do the platforms themselves have influence?
> so you can begin a (regex) search with / and hit n to go to the next result or N to go back.
His point of that being slower still stands. I also find that just googling generally what I want can more quickly lead me to a stack overflow post with exactly what is needed, while MAN pages can be rather cryptic at times without reading the whole thing.
I think it would be interesting if there were a Latin equivalent of Chinese characters. Different roots could be represented as different characters, some could be used for each of the suffixes like "ly", "tion", etc., and the characters would be joined together to create words like in Chinese.
Different Romantic languages could be represented this way. In the same way that Mandarin and Cantonese use the similar character sets with different pronunciations, and with some characters specific to each one, different languages that have Latin roots would have a few of their own characters specific to their own language, but mostly drawing from the Latin pool.
The pronunciation for each would have to be memorized of course.
To be fair, you can also "come up with something" in Chinese. Since there aren't all that many sounds, you can write in generic characters for the sound of the word that you can't remember.
I did something like this a long time ago in a little competition for beating others' rock paper scissors programs, except I used the other players' moves relative to my own (e.g. my program could catch on to the other player choosing the move that would beat my last move) as well as their current pattern of winning or losing.
I personally like the idea of tabs better, but prefer spaces because it makes navigating the text less awkward when traversing tabs. It may sound stupid, but for my own stuff it's just more comfortable.
> "Using pinyin as you suggest is actually hopelessly slow"
Everyone I've encountered in China seems to do it just fine. It is only hopelessly slow if you type one character at a time.
> "adopting an input method based on the character radical composition or handwriting recognition is much faster"
What character radical input method are you talking about? I can't imagine any input method using radical composition being faster, it would be comparable to using Latin roots to type out English words; there are just too many to be practical. You can actually do this on Pleco, but it takes forever, even longer than typing one character at a time in pinyin.
Handwriting could work assuming you can handwrite Chinese quickly (I would be deathly slow as I can't read a typical handwritten cursive note, much less write one). I think handwriting recognition is already pretty good, people just use pinyin because it's the easiest.
The wubi input method (五笔字形) uses radical composition or something like it -- keys represent different (semi-arbitrary) character portions, and you "build" characters by choosing the portions, and adding other keys that indicate the overall shape of the character. You can get nearly any character out there in four keys, usually much less, and it also does phrase input. It's much harder to learn, obviously, but a practiced wubi typist is supposed to be able to go faster than pinyin.
Over the years I've tried to teach myself, and I can sort of do it, but I never got fast enough to really switch away from pinyin.
Pinyin is just fine (or zhuyin in my case), but the parent is right about one thing. Structure based inputs like Cangjie and Wubi are really fast. Fewer strokes per character and zero need to select from a list mean more speed.
