One of the most essential Chinese learning tools of all: 打汉字 (and how to train your students to do it effectively)

Too many students learn Chinese for months, sometimes years, and yet never learn to 打字. Let's explore how to remedy this...

Heads up: this is a bumper article, grab a cup of tea and settle down to read!

One of the most important tools for your learners is being able to type 汉字 into phones and laptops: 打字！

你好，fellow 老师们！

Welcome to this week’s article, about a most important Chinese learning tool: typing 汉字 into phones and laptops.

We all know that Chinese native speakers almost NEVER type pinyin to each other on a phone or application like WeChat or WhatsApp.

That is just not normal.

In the same way, we must never allow our learners to carry on typing pinyin for an extended time.

It is also not normal.

I believe students must learn almost right away that Chinese is a character based language and they must get used to seeing characters and being able to engage with them as soon as possible.

The sooner they can learn to type characters into their phones, the better.

So let’s run a quick check:

Reflect on your Chinese learners and consider these two questions:

1. Are they able to type characters into their phones or laptops?

2. Or are they still only able to type pinyin using the English keyboard?

If they only know how to type pinyin, I can say for sure this is probably holding them back on making progress with learning Chinese effectively.

For every one of your learners (even the young ones), it is vital to help guide them on how to type characters in their phones as soon as possible.

However, it isn’t so straightforward.

If it was easy, all Chinese learners would know how to do it without much help.

Not only are there technical elements involved with the software, there are also several difficulties learners may face when attempting to type Chinese too.

The good news is:

• It’s not that complicated to teach and get them set up swiftly if you have a checklist and a plan (I will share the details during the live session - register to receive the invite)

• In general, 打-ing 汉字 is a free tool (at least on Macs and iPhones)

• I have a live training and a lesson flow to help train students on how to 打汉字 on iPhones and MacBooks easily and effectively. Read on for more.

In the rest of this article we’ll break down:

Part 1:

Why it’s so important for every one of your learners to know how to type Chinese characters

Part 2:

How to setup - the technical details of setting up to 打汉字

Part 3:

Some vital details on how to train them to do this effectively and confidently

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Let’s begin. Firstly:

Part 1: Why it is so important that your learners can 打汉字 as soon as possible 

1 - They will start to understand what it takes to communicate like native Chinese speakers do 

Being able to type Chinese is fundamental to all native Chinese speakers.

By bringing your learners into the same world, it will enable them to see and feel how it is to engage in Chinese on the most common platform for communication now: their phones.

2 - It will help them realise why they can’t use pinyin forever

By being able to type characters, your students will inevitably see several options for the same pinyin word (e.g. if they type ‘jiao’ they’ll get 叫，脚，教 and tonnes more!).

This will help them comprehend better how pinyin and characters function together, and realise how characters work and are infinitely more important to spend time learning.

For some of my students, it is not until they see that there are several options for the same pinyin word, and realise how important it is to learn to recognise different Chinese characters.

3 - It will help develop their vocabulary, not just their character recognition

Students will no doubt see character suggestions and combinations when they start typing characters. They’ll become more familiar with double character combinations and understand that some characters form bonds and can be written as one word in pinyin (e.g. nihao 你好, laoshi 老师).

4 - *BONUS!* Your learners will be able to better use online or digital dictionaries independently

Using a dictionary is crucial for new learners, but it is surprising how few beginner Chinese learners have or know how to use one. We must help them to learn how - and teaching them to type Chinese is one way to do this.

Chinese learners must be able to use a dictionary, but if they can’t type or write characters into the dictionary, it’s less effective.

However, if they know how to 打汉字, it solves this problem and makes it possible for them to use digital dictionaries as well.

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So now we understand why this is so important to teach new learners, let’s go through how to train them on it.

Part 2: The technical setup - Macs & iPhones

Firstly, the technical aspect. I can only speak about Apple Macbooks and iPhones, because I’ve never typed Chinese on a different type of phone.

In the iPhone, the setup is as follows:

Settings > Keyboard > Keyboards > Add new keyboard > Chinese, Simplified > Check the ✅ Pinyin Qwerty & ✅ Pinyin Handwriting.

Select the ‘Global’ Icon in the bottom left of the screen when you go to type something. And you’ll see the options for selecting Pinyin and Handwriting there!

Helpful tips:

+ Tell them they can change the language entry using the globe sign.

+ Set up Chinese handwriting 手写 input AND Pinyin 拼音 input.

+ You can arrange the order of the language (so that English is the first, default, and then Chinese a second or third)

+ Help them see which one is handwriting (teach the character for 手), because they won’t be able to see pinyin on the phone in English)

Here are the steps for the MacBook:

System preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources > Pinyin Simplified

Helpful tips: you can assign a better shortcut to flip between English and Chinese in the same keyboard window: shortcuts > input sources > create a new shortcut.

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Once they have the technical side figured out, thirdly, there are three useful things to point out once your students are setup:

Part 3:

3 important details to show your students about using their phones to 打汉字

These are some useful things to show learners who have Character input setup:

1 - Shortcuts with pinyin: e.g. nh = 你哈, dh = 电话, etc. 

It is so fun to show learners they can simply enter ‘nh’ and 你好 will show up! Some easy, common words to let them try and test out the ‘shortcut’ tip are:

ZJ = 再见

NH = 你好

LS = 老师

XS = 学生

HD = 好的

2 - Digital culture language - 88, 55555, 么么, 好滴？etc. 

When I first started typing Chinese to Chinese people, they used some fun stuff to express themselves! It took me by surprise to learn that 88 meant 再见, among other things. I usually teach beginner learners some of the basics like:

88 = Byebye

5555 = Wuwuwuwuwu = Crying!

好滴 (with a di instead of de)

么么么 = for my close friends, an alternative for xxXxx or little digital kisses

3 - Drawing totally unknown characters

You can explain that learners don’t need to get stroke order 100% accurate to be able to find a new character on their phones.

However, they do need to try and follow stroke order to replicate a new character by hand, and it will likely get the character to show up for them.

In general, we should pre-teach the basics of stroke order to new learners before training them on how to start using handwriting entry in their phones.

I usually provide a set of more complex characters that my new learners will definitely not recognise and set a challenge to see who can be the first to find the meaning in their dictionaries. Examples of characters that are slightly more complicated and provide a fun challenge for a brand new learner to try out drawing characters in their phones are generally colours and body parts, because they are typically quite complex for a new learner to write. A side benefit is that more complex characters help train students to recognise and notice details of characters when they are trying to copy them into their phones:

颜色

蓝色

脚

脑子

红色

Summary

It is vital that all of your learners can type Chinese into their phones!

First, as teachers we must understand the reasons it is so important. The three key reasons to teach learners to 打汉字 as soon as possible are:

1. It’s how Chinese native speakers use the language.

2. It will help wean them off pinyin more rapidly.

3. It will help develop their vocabulary, not just their characters.

4. BONUS: It will mean they can use a digital dictionary more effectively.

In the details of the article above, I share the steps to help learners get set up with typing Chinese.

I also share some ideas on details to show them how to play around and get effective with using Chinese.

As you can see, the above is almost a whole lesson’s worth of time and energy by itself! But the return on investment using this time to set your students up with this key tool is lasting and valuable.

Need more? Want to see how I teach it and receive the lesson plan and slides for this session?

I will be going through all the details of how to train your students to do this effectively in the next live session. I will share the exact lesson plan and slides I use. Be sure to register here to receive the invites, joining links, recordings and more.

Bye for now!

Sumbella

P.S. If you are a teacher who knows how to set up the pinyin input and character input on a non-iOS phone or computer, please let me know, and if you feel generous, share in the comments.