Less is More: From 9
to 6
Wang Code 6
Digits
A
revolutionary method that allows you to
type 80,000 Chinese characters with 6
digits
19 December 2006
According to the
figures given by China’s Ministry of
Information Industry, by the end of the
October 2006, China had 450 million mobile
phone users, and by the end of October this
year 350 billion text messages were sent.
Inputting Chinese characters into a tiny
handset, though painstaking, has grown into
one of the chief methods of communication in
daily life as well as in business situations.
One of the most
commonly used methods of inputting Chinese is
by hanyu pinyin, a code system that uses
Latin alphabet to spell the sounds of the
official Chinese language. Though better than
other known pinyin input systems, still it
has inherited flaws. The requirement of
selecting a character from a menu of
candidates with same sound makes the typing
absurdly laborious and time consuming. And
the process of input is actually more about
coding than writing - the disconnection from
the written form presents a real challenge to
general population’s handwriting skills.
Salvation came in 2004
when a professor in China demonstrated how he
had integrated the structure of written
characters and Arabic numerals. It
practically means it is 9, instead of 26,
keys that are all needed when typing Chinese.
It does take a bit more effort to learn, but
once having mastered "Wang Code 9
Keys" or "Wang Code 9 Digits",
as it is named, you would be able to write in
Chinese on computer much faster than you
would in English. In reality, an experienced
user can input a maximum of 100 Chinese
characters per minute.
The
inventor of the Wang Code Input Methods
Just at the time when
you think the things couldn’t get any
better, on Saturday, 16 December, the
professor announced in Beijing’s Great Hall
of People that he had successfully turned his
"9 Digits" upside down. So now
"6 Digits" rules.
The basic principle of
the 6D is to have six digits corresponding to
six key strokes of Chinese characters. The
numbers from 1 to 6 represent a horizontal
line (一), a vertical line
(|), a left stroke (／), a right stroke (＼), a turn (ㄥ) and a square (口) respectively. By coding the
first four plus the last strokes of a
character, the desired character will appear.
With this
revolutionary method, anyone who knows how to
write Chinese on paper needs only five
minutes to learn how to write Chinse on
computer.
The biggest draw of
this wonder method is of enabling cell phone
users to compose text messages at a speed as
rapidly as spring rain falling on the ground,
and that probably is why the inventor
formally named the "6 Keys" or
"6 Digits" 王码春雨 (Wang Code Spring
Rain).
Previously it was
believed by many that due to the unique
nature of the Chinese written language, there
was very little likelihood of a
"standard" method evolving. And the
Chinese government is going to prove it is
wrong - A standard text messaging input
method is said will be promulgated next year.
