Toolkit for language students
( 2003-08-25 09:20) (China Daily)
A word processing toolkit
that can help people learn Chinese was released last month in Beijing.
The toolkit, known as all-phoneme word inputting software, makes it possible
for people to type in the phonetic symbols of a Chinese character when they do
not know how to write it, according to Kou Sen, chairman of Beijing Quanyintong
Corp and inventor of the software.
Keyboard Chinese language inputing has been a major obstacle for Chinese
computer users, who are often frustrated at the difficulty of transforming a
Chinese character into phonetic alphabets. This is the case for foreigners too,
when they try to memorize the distinctive structure of each Chinese character
and associate it with its pronunciation.
Experts have developed various toolkits to help with the translation and many
are available today. But Kou said his invention improves word inputting speed so
that it is almost as fast as normal speech and breaks the barrier between the
pronunciation and structure of Chinese characters. A foreigner may learn to
speak Chinese first and use the phonetic alphabet when typing the character in
according to the toolkit rules. The word is then automatically transformed into
a Chinese character, doing away with the need to memorize the abstract structure
of each character. The inputting rules, based on Kou's reserach of Chinese
language for decades, is different from the commonly used hanyu pinyin. They are
much simpler, requiring less typing and dispense with the stringent four-tone
rules that are characteristic of Chinese language yet often bewildering for
foreigners.
Kou said his company is now perfecting the function and it will be available
in new editions of the toolkit.
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