I am a little tired from learning Nest.js for one month recently. Today, I will share some non-technical things — wubi input method.

Maybe few people know that I have been using wubi input method to type, and maybe even fewer people know that I did not learn wubi from childhood, but learned it when I was a junior, and have been using it now.

This article is not to say how good wubi is, nor to teach you wubi input method, just to share wubi input method, and learn its story.

At that time wubi was very fast

I first saw Wubi on Windows 98 at home when I was in primary school.

If you took a computer class in elementary school, you’ll be familiar with the following:

Windows at that time in addition to the above standard pinyin input method, and Zheng code, Cang Jie input method, double spell, table code input method and so on. I believe that most people only have a big impression on pinyin, Shuangpin and Wubi, among which the most used by the post-90s is pinyin input method.

At that time, the computer performance is very poor, the memory is very small, the software of the input method is not like now has a lot of functions, such as intelligent, word cloud, hot word, pinyin correction, resulting in the use of pinyin to type 3 or 4 words need to be very accurate pinyin, wrong one can not be displayed, and once there is a heavy code also have to choose a half day. Therefore, even if the pinyin input method was used at that time, it was generally more than one word and words, like today, it is relatively rare to play a string.

This leads to a problem: there are a lot of heavy weights for single characters and words in pinyin:

Shide is like making the wet know...Copy the code

Sometimes it comes out like this:

While wubi input method can achieve accurate hit in typing single characters and words, 4 letters can accurately combine a word:

And 2 ~ 3 letters can be typed out of a single common word, some even 1 letter is finished.

The “fast” and “accurate” of Wubi made my parents’ generation choose wubi input method when they first got in touch with the computer, thinking that wubi is faster than Pinyin.

Font input method

I believe that most people have heard of wubi, but they do not know much about it, only that it is typed by splitting the structure of Chinese characters.

However, this “glyph” input method is very selective. In addition to the wubi character root corresponding to Chinese, there are a lot of weird input methods (can’t help but wonder how the big guys came up with these input methods) :

Here are two commonly heard input methods:

Double input method, it is to use Chinese initials, finals each with a letter (or individual symbols) instead of the composition of pinyin coding, simple can be understood as pinyin + font = word. Using the pinyin input method, users only need to type the pinyin of a character twice. For example, if you enter “Zhong” in “China”, you can type VS to complete the word and sound input.

Zheng code input method, also known as the “universal root code”, is a Chinese philologist, “Yinghua Dictionary” chief editor Zheng Yili after the research of Chinese characters, after his daughter Zheng Long completed a font input method.

However, because “double spelling” typing or rely on pinyin, so the heavy code problem is still serious, and zheng code typing rules are more complex than wubi, so more people will choose to use wubi input method.

Although the wubi input method has long stipulated which letter corresponds to which character root, there are still three editions up to now: 86 edition, 98 edition and new Century edition. Since the major iterations of these editions only corrected the rules for the letter -> root, there were only 3 editions. I’m currently using version 98. Think of 2021, still using 98 things, spanning 23 years, can not help but sigh.

Wubi root

Finally talking about the rules of Wubi, the principle of Wubi is to spell out a word by piecing together the root, such as “good” can be divided into “female” and “son”, and V corresponds to “female”, B corresponds to “son”, so to type “good” word, use “VB” :

Among them, here “female” and “child” is the word root we often say, and the wubi input method is a big difficulty is to remember the correspondence between the letter -> word root. Don’t worry, let’s continue to talk about the root division of wubi.

The reason why Wubi is called “Wubi” is that it divides our keyboard into five areas:

From top to bottom, respectively with “skimming” (blue), “na” (orange), “heng” (red), “vertical” (green), “fold” (yellow) related to/the beginning of the root, you may feel that the “bird” on the Q side is also “skimming”?? Therefore, the root here is based on the “relevance” and “beginning” of strokes, only as a simple classification reference. The bird here is written with the word “prime”, so it is classified as Q in the upper left.

I think a lot of people would look at this picture, including me. In order to better remember the relationship between the letters and the root (root table), some people have invented “tips” to remember the picture:

(1) The first district (horizontal district) 11G King side Qingtou drop out (concurrently) May Day, (concurrently "with" "drop out" the same pronunciation) 12F turks two dry ten inches of rain. 13D Big dog Sanyang Ancient Stone Factory, (" sheep "refers to the bottom of the sheep character) 14S Wooden dingxi, 15A Gongge Caotou right frame seven. The second area (vertical area) 21H eyes on the tiger skin, (" wu Shang "refers to the upper part of the character) 22J early two stand up and worm. 23K mouth and sichuan, sparse root, 24L field a frame four car force. (" square "namely" kou ") 25M mountain by shell, the next box a few. (" lower frame "is" JIong ") (3) third area (prime) 31T Wo Bamboo a prime pair, (" Double "is" derivation ") anti article tiotou total 31, (" Tiotou "namely" hydrogen ") 32R white look at the first three two jin, (" Kan "is") 33E month's wheat is used for home's sake. 34W and eight, three, four li, (" man "and" eight "in 34) 35Q golden spoon defect fish without tail. (" spoon defect "means" 勹 ") Dog left fork little dog, (refers to "dog", "dog", "dog", "dog") Shi Wu Qi (wife). 41st Division, Highhead ye Who went, 42U Lisung two points six men are ill, and jus 43I waterside unbelievably small headstand. Form 44O Huo Ye Head, four meters, 45P foot of the road is added to the foot of the road. (" 礻, 衤 "remove the dot on the right) (5) the fifth area (fold area) 51N has been half full, the left box fold corpse heart and feather. 52B son ear also frame up, (" frame up "namely" bodyguard ") 53V female dao Jiu Jiu Mountain faces west. Good mother has no heart for bow and dagger, young and weak. (" young "without" force "is" MAO ")Copy the code

When I was young, I was forced by my mother to memorize the root list once or twice, but I only memorized it once or twice before I gave up. By my junior year, I still only recited it once or twice and then gave up. Personally, I still think reciting these “tips” is useless, the key is to rely on practice.

Splitting the root is a tricky task

Sometimes the root of the word is not as simple as the word “good”, such as: how to split the word “every”? You can say very simple ah: above “cross” + “mother” not line yao? That of course is not, if you carefully control the root table to find is to find the “mother” this root, because “mother” is not a root. Don’t ask. Asking is the rule.

“Every” should be broken down into “horizontal” + “mother no two points” + “horizontal” :

So, the word root is also a skill. When I first began to learn Wubi, I would often search for how to remove these words, and until now, for some words, my first reaction is also difficult to think of how to remove. For example, I often forget how to open the word “JIANG” in THE “DJI” in which I practiced before, because it is really difficult to remember, and I forget again after checking it every time:

Check word root this website, I am to use I love wubi net this website to check. If you can’t type this word, how can you search for it? Therefore, this is one of the important reasons why I use “Pinyin” + “Wubi” mixed input method to type. In a nutshell:

Miscellaneous rules

In addition to the above two sets of rules of “word breaking root” and “word root table”, Wubi also has many small rules:

Wubi input can not be more than 5 codes, that is to say, generally only 2 words, you want to type a sentence is almost impossible, unless there is a relatively special sentence.

That’s another problem: what if there are more than four roots in some words? For example, the word “key” :

Therefore, Wubi rules that the first three are the normal order of the root, and then ignore until the last root, the last root as the fourth code of the word. For example, the final root of the “key” word is “zhe na”, which directly ignores the “vertical” on the right side.

Some people may think that the final root of the word “key” should not be “vertical” right? You should fold horizontal first and then write t on the upper right, so the last root is vertical. In fact, such writing order is wrong, should first “lut” and then “fold”, so ah, often write wrong people also difficult to use five strokes to break the word.

Sometimes, it is not necessary to split all the roots, such as the word “just”, just split the left half of the word, equivalent to shorthand:

Another situation that really annoys me is “complement,” which, by the way, is the same as computer binary. For example, the word “thousand” should be split like this:

The above “prime” and “ten” can piece together the word “thousand”, but because of the double code problem (yes, the five strokes still have the double code problem), so need to complement the code to specify to type this word. This “chuan” (K key) is the complement, and it is thought in this order:

  • The last stroke of “thousand” is vertical, so it is positioned in the vertical area
  • And because the word “thousands” is semi-enclosed structure, and then positioned in the vertical area of the third key K (the first key H is left and right structure, the second key J is up and down structure, the third key K is semi-enclosed structure, the fourth L key is fully enclosed structure)

Perhaps the most surprising part of this is not the “complement” rule, but the fact that the word “thousand” is f * * king classified as semi-enclosed (to be honest, I think it’s upper and lower, and I don’t know why it’s classified as semi-enclosed).

Although the frequency of “complement” is not very high, but it appears in some simple words, so sometimes it is quite painful.

I’m sure you’ll be confused by the rules, but don’t close the page just yet. I told you I’m not here to teach you, but to share my story with him.

My wubi learning road

The above gives you a simple popularization of the Wubi. At the same time, it explains that the wubi input method is really difficult by telling the rules of wubi, and the learning route is very steep. Now let’s tell the story of me and wubi.

It says that I first saw Wubi on my computer at home. Because wubi “fast” and “accurate” advantage, my parents are using wubi input method, but uncomfortable is that they do not install pinyin input method! As a result, I didn’t use the computer to type much in my childhood. I could only use it for red alert and CS 1.6.

In fact, at that time I also want to learn wubi, after all, this can install B, the class of students will not only I will be more cattle B ah. Then, reality hit me straight in the face: homework is not finished, learn, learn shit.

By the time of junior and senior high school, whether Microsoft pinyin or Sogou Pinyin and other input software, tools have had a qualitative leap. More and more people are turning to pinyin input methods.

What impressed me most was that I used Microsoft Pinyin to type words one by one. Then one day my cousin said, “Please install this input method and try to type a whole sentence.” After typing a string of pinyin, I could still correctly identify it, although there were several obvious mistakes.

Another deep impression is that the original hospital doctors are slowly from the wubi input method to pinyin input method.

Then I used pinyin all the way to university. Until I got an opportunity to study abroad in my junior year, I had nothing to do after I got the Offer.

One day my father says I struggle sound teacher dozen wrong, say don’t you learn to learn five pens? I thought about it, anyway, idle is idle, so I want to learn a whim to learn wubi, thus opened my wubi learning road.

At the beginning of learning is also to understand the rules of the game, but that only know the “word root” and “back root”, the above said that those miscellaneous rules I do not know all.

You might wonder how I memorized this root list. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how my father learned wubi, but I know my mother learned to recite the word root, so I also recite the formula and then recite the word root table.

However, after two days of memorizing, I found a problem: even if I could recite the words, I still couldn’t type them out. It was a bit like “memorizing the entire JavaScript Definitive Guide and still can’t write pages”.

Behind, I simply do not back, to open which word directly to find the corresponding root in the root table. Meanwhile, in order to force myself to learn wubi, I directly set the default input method of my mobile phone and computer to Wubi input method. Unless there was an emergency, I typed with five strokes, and it took me almost a long time to get a word out. You can imagine how difficult it was for the person I was talking to. I don’t know if that was lucky or tragic.

Because too few people and I chat, the usual practice of the opportunity is not much, so, in order to strengthen my devil training again, I also on the phone under a wubi typing training App. Now, I have forgotten the name of the App, but the interface is similar to the following, which is not very nice, but it can be used:

After the life from playing king of Glory every day, changed every day face brush one or two hours of root practice, anyway, also have no time to panic, nothing to practice for a while, practice to form muscle memory. From level one, two, three simple code practice to computer Jinshan typing through. Finally, after a month, I wrote these two articles with wubi input method:

Of course, write these two articles of the time is also to talk about chi chi write, typing speed is certainly not as good as now. It has been four years. Time is money.

The last

In general, I do not recommend you to learn Wubi, which is like Vim. Only through forced use of them in the early stage, muscle memory is formed, and the pleasure brought by it can be slowly enjoyed in the later stage. The process of training in the middle is very painful. Besides, Wubi is different from Vim. Except for partition, which is easier to understand, I think other rules are some “degraded” schemes similar to solving the heavy code problem, which are very difficult to remember and can only be remembered through a lot of practice.

Now the input method is also very mature in terms of intelligence, hot lexicon and associative functions, and has long surpassed the Wubi input method in a wave, so wubi comparison pinyin input method is not as fast as before. However, in some words and words of the scene, I use wubi will be more convenient, so, my computer and mobile phone still use wubi input method, but wubi input method is the main, spelling input method is supplemented, typing to see who is fast, who is quick to use who.

Finally, I would like to share with you some common equipment of Wubi:

  • IOS mobile phone: Qingge Wubi input method (pinyin + Wubi mixed)
  • Computer: Sogou Wubi input method (pinyin + Wubi mixed)
  • Wubi reverse check: I love Wubi