# Learning Resources: Pinyin input for Mac users



## ho chi feen

Nimen hao!

Well, right away, you see my problem there.... I need an effective method for including intonation in pinyin. I've only just started learning mandarin, so for now pinyin is the way to go for me.

I'm a mac user. Now, I know that I can go locate various symbols, etc, but it would be great if there were some pinyin friendly keyboard setting... for example, on my Irish keyboard layout I can place a fada (accent) on 'e' by pression alt+e... é. Now, if I could do something similar, but with a distinction, say for ni hao... i+option+3 to place the third tone on 'ni'... +2 to use the second tone, etc... that would be great.

Does anyone have an idea if there is anything I can use to faciliate this?


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## univerio

Refer to this page:



> http://tlt.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/codemacext.html


It's too complicated to explain it here.


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## frogball

My comment is not directly related to you inquiry (which does seem to have been answered well already), but it occurs to me that eventually you might want to produce Chinese characters, and I wonder if you know about Open Vanilla. This is an application for the Mac that allows you to input pinyin and then select the appropriate characters for a document. Check it out at openvanilla.org - it's open source and free (sorry, I can't give you a link). Good luck with learning Chinese.


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## ho chi feen

frogball said:


> My comment is not directly related to you inquiry (which does seem to have been answered well already), but it occurs to me that eventually you might want to produce Chinese characters, and I wonder if you know about Open Vanilla. This is an application for the Mac that allows you to input pinyin and then select the appropriate characters for a document. Check it out at openvanilla.org - it's open source and free (sorry, I can't give you a link). Good luck with learning Chinese.



Thanks, that looks interesting.


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## ho chi feen

frogball said:


> My comment is not directly related to you inquiry (which does seem to have been answered well already), but it occurs to me that eventually you might want to produce Chinese characters, and I wonder if you know about Open Vanilla. This is an application for the Mac that allows you to input pinyin and then select the appropriate characters for a document. Check it out at openvanilla.org - it's open source and free (sorry, I can't give you a link). Good luck with learning Chinese.


Can't quite figure it out though... unfortunately, all the documentation is in Chinese.

The pinyin input on Mac OSX seems okay though.


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## frogball

Yes, the documentation is a problem! Basically, once installed, OpenVanilla appears as an option in the international keyboard list. Open 'International' via the flag on the menu bar, check OpenVanilla in the Input Menu list, and then, when you want to write Chinese characters, you switch from your normal keyboard to OV. When you type a word in pinyin, OV then gives you a palette of characters (given that one pinyin word can mean several things), and you select the one you want via its assigned number. It's easier done than said, actually, and the Chinese friend who uses it is getting quite fast at it. As I said, it's not of immediate use to you if your main consideration is learning Chinese through pinyin.


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## ho chi feen

frogball said:


> Yes, the documentation is a problem! Basically, once installed, OpenVanilla appears as an option in the international keyboard list. Open 'International' via the flag on the menu bar, check OpenVanilla in the Input Menu list, and then, when you want to write Chinese characters, you switch from your normal keyboard to OV. When you type a word in pinyin, OV then gives you a palette of characters (given that one pinyin word can mean several things), and you select the one you want via its assigned number. It's easier done than said, actually, and the Chinese friend who uses it is getting quite fast at it. As I said, it's not of immediate use to you if your main consideration is learning Chinese through pinyin.



Well Frogball, I've got to say, it's working quite well. 谢谢你！I'm just wondering though, if you use OV maybe you can help me with one little problem I have:

Whenever I type in shei (with the second tone... 'who/whom') the palette goes blank, and doesn't produce any results. Don't know why this is, but it's a little bit of a problem.


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## frogball

We had the same problem, but my friend discovered that you must write shui to get 谁.


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## ho chi feen

frogball said:


> We had the same problem, but my friend discovered that you must write shui to get 谁.



Cool, thanks.


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## ho chi feen

One other thing... I'm having trouble getting the character for he(1) - to drink. This is the closest I can find when I type 'he' - 喝 But that doesn't look right, at the bottom or on the left- at least going by the character in my textbook.


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## samanthalee

Hi ho chi feen,

You are right, it doesn't look right. But it is the right unicode character. When I typed with Microsoft IME, I can find the right character (double-click on the attached to see). But when I choose that character, I get 喝 too. Maybe it's the Japanese way of writing the character as unicode is the unified CJK character-set.


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## ho chi feen

Hmm, I see, quite interesting- would people reading it recognise its meaning, nonetheless?


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## nonchalant

Hi, *I'*m having some problems in typing pinyin in mac.
*N*ot sure if you all have met with the same problems.

*B*asically,
when *I'*m typing *P*inyin like zhi zhe (指着）or yu yan （寓言）and also words that are of similar pattern, the colourful circle plate will appear. *T*hen *I* can no longer type any *C*hinese character until *I* restart my com.

*I* hope that you all can provide me with some suggestions to solve it! *T*hanks~~


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## samanthalee

nonchalant said:


> *B*asically,
> when *I'*m typing *P*inyin like zhi zhe (指着）or yu yan （寓言）and also words that are of similar pattern, the colourful circle plate will appear.



Hi nonchalant,
Welcome to the WR forums.

You mention "words that are of similar pattern", I don't see a pattern though...perhaps you can describe the pattern?

I don't use Mac, so I can't help you. But to help things along, I'll like to clarify some details...Were you typing Chinese Characters via Pinyin, or were you typing Pinyin? What software are you using to type? Does the problem happen when typing in the web browser or in the word processor (please give the name of the browser/word processor)? Which Mac OS are you using?


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## nonchalant

well the pattern is in a 词语，as long as the first letter of the 2 words are similar. like *ZH*i *ZH*e or *Y*u* Y*an or *Y*ou *Y*ue. the laptop get hanged a little and i cannot type simplified pinyin anymore which means whatever i typed is just alphabets, chinese characters will not appear.

i was typing chinese characters via pinyin and this problem occurs in any place that im typing, in word docs, in messengers....

im currently using mac OS ver10.5.

and your help is greatly appreciated. thanks.


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## AVim

nonchalant said:


> well the pattern is in a 词语,as long as the first letter of the 2 words are similar. like *ZH*i *ZH*e or *Y*u* Y*an or *Y*ou *Y*ue. the laptop get hanged a little and i cannot type simplified pinyin anymore which means whatever i typed is just alphabets, chinese characters will not appear.
> 
> i was typing chinese characters via pinyin and this problem occurs in any place that im typing, in word docs, in messengers....
> 
> im currently using mac OS ver10.5.
> 
> and your help is greatly appreciated. thanks.



Sounds like Input Method's problem, What about changing to use other input method? 
As Mac users are not as many as other systems here, I don't think this forum can give a quick response to your question. So, why not post it to a professional Mac forum?


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## ck65

what's your input method though? 
i'm using Fun Input Toy (known as FIT) which you can find here: http://fit.coollittlethings.com/?page_id=3
choose the download link which fits your system version and the cpu.

i've been using FIT all the time and till now i didn't get any errors from it.
g'luck!


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