As a cantonese from HK, I didn’t know how to “type from my mouth” as a kid. I learned Cangjie during high school but I have never become really proficient with it. Chinese is not exactly a phonetic language. But when I write IM, email, or just blog in Chinese. I found it much better to type phonetically as I don’t need to switch my thought to letter ideograph. When I write to mandarin friends, pinyin is great. However, when I chat to friends back home in HK, my message will have “accent” when I try to type in pinyin since I try to “speak” my thought in mandarin when I type.
I finally ended up to have the will to learn jyutping last year. One of the romanization system for Cantonese. I won’t say it is a perfect system (I know it is a standard for linguist but I still found it quite weird to use j for y). Both android and windows have decent input method for jyutping. As for Ubuntu…, there is a jyutping for ibus. But saying it to be horrible is actually a compliment. It is essentially unusable as many common words are missing. And the table is sorted in an absolutely ridiculous way with the top of the table starting with words that no native speakers will ever use.
Fortunately, ibus-table does come with a function to allow users create their own tables. After getting character frequency from Chih-Hao Tsai’s site and jyutping phonetic from HanConv, at least I can build a usable table for myself. There is still lots of tweakings to do though as HanConv does not cover the sounds for all the characters from Chih-Hao Tsai. And some of the pronunciations seem incorrect or at least uncommon. I guess I will make another post to share the final table when it becomes more mature.