Hello,

My experience with Cangjie and Wubi is somewhat limited, nevertheless I have noticed primary differences between the two.

Cangjie requires considerable thought in identifying key structural elements comprising a given character, making Cangjie a far more "elegant" character input method. On the other hand, Wubi is less articulate and more cumbersome over all. I believe it may be fair to say that Cangjie involves a more theory, whereas Wubi takes the "brute force" approach, the advantage of which is its relative ease and simplicity.

The problem I've encountered with Cangjie concerns the odd-ball characters which require nothing less than rote memorization. For instance, characters which contain "x" are (by definition) exceptions to the rule. There are many other nondescript characters such as the Buddhist swastika "wan" and other primitive forms which defy the rules altogether.

In the earlier versions of Cangjie, the input codes were in strict accordance with the character shapes mandated by the Taiwan government--regardless of whether the official Taiwanese shapes were universally accepted by Chinese worldwide. One example (of which there are several hundred) is the character "wei4" ( "wei shenme de wei") whose simplified Japanese form was given precedence over its orthodox Chinese form .

With the latest release of Cangjie, I have had to relearn the input codes for a number of characters, but that's really quite acceptable. Lastly, with Cangjie I'm never 100% sure that I have exhausted every possible means when unable to input a character.

Nevertheless, Wubi has one fatal shortcoming as far as I'm concerned--it is NOT ergonomic. When inputting Chinese, or any language for that matter, the keyboard operator should be free to focus his/her eyes on the manuscript and not be forced to glance back and forth between the manuscript and screen each time a word is entered. I'm told the Chinese have a term for this worst form of tedium: "pa gezi". Not only does this attribute to increased fatigue and a higher error ratio, the keyboard operator also tends to loose his/her place when typing.

In summary, I would say Wubi is much simpler and easier to learn, but is no match for Cangjie if your intention is to use it professionally, i.e., typing a 20+ page document without undue fatigue and/or eye strain.

Cheers,

Walt Stewart

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Replying to:

Dear Kirk:

As this is an open forum and as I am not familiar with Wubi, I was hoping some reader of this web will give the complete answer to your questions. I would wish I am not the only one to answer questions in this forum. This has not happen, so sorry for the delay and here are some remarks I can make that could be useful:

Wubi is used in main land China for simplified characters while CangJie is used for traditional characters in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Cantonese characters count as traditional and can be typed with CangJie, not with Wubi.

I never heard of a Wubi IME (program) that could be adapted in a Chinese Operating system for traditional characters.

On the contrary, the CangJie method is already adapted to input simplified characters. This exist for a long time already in NJ Star Chinese enabling programs (based in Australia) and recently such drivers were created and are available at www.chinesecj.com.

This means that, if you learn CJ for traditional characters, it will be very easy to adapt to simplified character input, and vice versa.

The number of key codes in CJ is a maximum of 5 but 95% of the time you can see the character you need after three keys.

Learning CJ is not difficult in principle; there are difficulties encountered when practicing. But then again, if you practice it much, it becomes really easy. Kids type 200 characters a minute (I will soon put a clip video on the web showing that). But the most important thing, is the cultural foundation of Cang Jie, its way to divide the characters according to meaning, and the unicity of their code (in CJ version five: a code covers one character only) which allows a real indexation of characters.

Thanks for your very good question. Your two sources were interesting. Note, I am rewamping the cj-web these days.

Eddy

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Replying to:

I am just now becoming familiar with Chinese text input methods, and was wondering what opinions anybody has re: Wubi as compared to CJS?




It seems that Wubi was invented after CJS (late 1990's vs. 1980), but they both meet the common goals of using the 24-26 (English) alpha characters on a PC keyboard to input Traditional or Simplified Chinese.




Wubi apparently saves keystrokes due to its "max 4" rule, and is also apparently "more logical" since it categorizes the keyboard keys a-y into 5 groups of 5. Is this true in practice?




Is Wubi becoming more popular than CJS? If so, why? (Or why not?) Wubi seems to have a rather steep learning curve, but CJS doesn't appear to be that easy to learn either.




Did Wubi originate with the ideas that Chu Bangfu encapsulated into Cang Jie? Are the 2 methods mutually exculsive competitors, or is one stronger for Mandarin and the other stronger for Cantonese? Or in other words, what's the pros and cons of each?




The main source of my information about Wubi was http://www.wangma.com.cn/newspaper/2000-12/new4.htm and http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~wicentow/wubixing.html




Thanks very much for any opinions.




Kirk