Many may shy away from Taobao and the essential chat tool (Wangwang) due to difficulties in inputting Chinese. I’d like to share and recommend an easy, simple and quick method here. Much quicker than handwriting on an input tab or on your Mac trackpad. Of course if you’re proficient with Changji or similar, then you need look further.
- if you are a Windows or Android user – go for Google Chinese Input, they have options for pinyin or handwrite too. I use the Putonghua pinyin which I recommend if you’ve some knowledge of pinyin (some is adequate, no need to be proficient- you’ll see). But you can also select Cantonese pinyin too. Try this here online first,and if you like, install here.
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if you use Mac, unfortunately Google input does not have a Mac version yet, the nearest is (Sogou pinyin – 搜狗拼音输入法), it’s works on similar principle.
Why I recommend? You just type the first pinyin letter for a phrase typically up to 3 words, then you’d be given immediate choice of the most common phrases, and in most cases, you can find your phrase in the first or first 3 pages (each page can be configured to show say a list of 5 or 7 phrases), sometimes, I just type 2 letters to get a common phrase just choose the one word I want. Let me just show you some examples using Putonghua pinyin in the captured screens below. If all input you can manage fail, you can always go to Google translate, type your English phrase, translate into Chinese, copy and paste- bingo!:
