Cangjie input method (倉頡輸入法) – Part 1

Posted by Mycado on March 25, 2010 · Leave a Comment 

First of all, many people think there is only way to input chinese, and this is completely wrong. Different place in China can have different input method, for example the mainland China use the pinyin (拼音), Taiwan use the zhuyin (註音), Wubi method (五筆字型輸入法), for cantonese we use jyutping (粤拼) and.. Hong-Kong people mostly use the Cangjie input method.

We will only talk about the difference between the pinyin and the cangjie, because they’re the most common for chinese input. The pinyin is based on the phonetic representation, for example “你好” is “ni hao” and pronounce in the same way. The cangjie is based on the graphological aspect of the characters, for example “你好” is “onf vnd“; we will see just after what is the meaning of these letters.

Let see with the character 胃 (pinyin: wei4, cangjie: WB):

胃 (wei4/WB)

胃 (wei4/WB)

So you will tell me, “okok easy, but how to know that W is 田 and B is 月 ?”. With Cangjie, we have a correspondance between the classic keyboard (QWERTY/AZERTY) and the cangjie characters (You can use a special keyboard (or stickers) if you don’t want to learn them):

  • A (日): Sun
  • B (月): Moon
  • C (金): Gold
  • D (木): Wood
  • E (水): Water
  • F (火): Fire
  • G (土): Earth
  • H (竹): Bamboo – The slant and short slant, the Kangxi radical 竹
  • I (戈): Weapon – The dot
  • J (十): Ten – The cross shape
  • K (大): Big – The X shape
  • L (中): Center – The vertical stroke
  • M (一): One – The horizontal stroke
  • N (弓): Bow – The crossbow and the hook
  • O (人): Person – The dismemberment, the Kangxi radical 人
  • P (心): Heart – The Kangxi radical 心
  • Q (手): Hand – The Kangxi radical 手
  • R (口): Mouth – The Kangxi radical 口
  • S (尸): Corpse – Three-sided enclosure with an opening on the side
  • T (廿): Twenty – Two vertical strokes connected by a horizontal stroke; the Kangxi radical 艸 when written as 艹.
  • U (山): Mountain – Three-sided enclosure with an opening on the top
  • V (女): Woman – A hook to the right, a V shape
  • W (田): Field – Four-sided enclosure
  • Y (卜): Fortune telling – The 卜 shape and rotated forms
  • X (重/難): Collision/Difficult – disambiguation of Cangjie code decomposition collisions, code for a “difficult-to-decompose” part
  • Z: Auxiliary code used for entering special characters

Next part we will see the rules to write characters, strokes of characters are traced according to a certain sequence. Write 胃 it’s easy, but how to write 線 or 課 ?

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