Since the RTH forum has been taken down, I'm not sure where to post this. However, I think this is still my best place to get any help.

Anyway, I'm trying to setup Traditional Chinese input on my Mom's new iPad Air 2. But I'm not sure how to go about this, as I'm kinda clueless when it comes Chinese.

Any suggestions as to which keyboards would be easy to learn?



Obviously handwriting will be one of the keyboards, but I'm thinking it might be worth having her learn one of the others.

Also, are there any good Chinese 3rd party keyboards?

i just use QWERTY pinyin. she should have the PLECO dictionary, which has a handwriting tab built in if she needs it... but I believe pinyin is fastest once youre past the basics.

that's my feeling and is what my young chinese friend told me. older people grew up handwriting everything so you do often see 40yo+ folks using just the handwritten input.

I would also recommend QWERTY pinyin, as it has the easiest learning curve for most people. Zhuyin is pretty much like pinyin, but is pretty much only used in Taiwan, it works largely the same way, but uses different symbols to represent different sounds. You also type out the tones in Zhuyin.

Stroke, sucheng and cangjie are all graphic-based input methods. It's usually faster to type with these kinds of input methods once you master them. However, the learning curve is much greater than that of phonetic input methods, so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't planning to write large amount of Chinese. One other thing to consider is that graphic-based input methods have a great advantage when it comes to writing non-mandarin dialects, or variant characters. But if you're just a casual writer of mandarin, the effort of learning it isn't really worth it for most people.