Hi all,

Firstly, thanks to the developers for this great tool. It's really fun and effective.

Now a suggestion: Could bopomofo (Taiwanese pinyin, basically) be added to the word-sets and added as an option instead of pinyin transliteration? Having bopomofo recognition would also give an easy way to input the pronunciation of a character for when that function is added. Since they're made of the same strokes as ordinary characters, I assume they would be easier to have the engine recognize than drawn Roman characters.

Xerxes

Interesting; I hadn't thought of using bopomofo as a pronunciation input tool. We were planning to have you type, rather than write, the pinyin letters, with some logic to group similar prompts together and avoid switching between writing and typing too often. But bopomofo could be interesting; it'd also be easy to recognize.

I'm interested to know how many learners would like bopomofo support in Skritter. We could do anything from having a bopomofo vocab list, just to learn the 37 characters, to having an option to turn all pinyin into bopomofo across the site. The latter one would only happen if there was significant interest, though, and it'd be a long time in coming.

Hello !

I'm also a Zhuyin Fuhao (Bopomofo) users and I would be happy to see that system being implemented in Skritter :)

Actually, Zhuyin Fuhao is not a "Taiwanese Pinyin" (they use Hanyu Pinyin for daily life stuff) but the way that Taiwanese (and some chinese school all over the world) learn how to pronunce chinese (it looks like the japanese Kana) and ensure that children can very quickly read Chinese. It's a very efficient way to learn how to pronunce chinese because it could be less disturbing than Hanyu Pinyin (for beginner at least), for exemple : To me (a french) Quan (全) is pronunced "kuan"

a no need from my side.

Me either...I love pinyin!

>bopomofo vocab list, just to learn the 37 characters
This for me, I have no idea how to read bopomofo, wouldn't hurt to learn it.

@ZachH : as you said, learning BPMF take 1h max but it's mainly aimed for beginner and those who wants to type chinese faster (it's much faster than Pinyin but less than Caijie (I think).

If someone wants to learn bopomofo, more power to them, but it's definitely not an essential thing to know if you're learning Chinese. I would never take up class time to teach it. So I guess that's a "no" vote from me.

If you're looking for a faster way to type, might I suggest using the "double pinyin" setting? Any syllable can be typed with two strokes, and once you learn the system, it's pretty fast.

I guess the few comments mentioning that BPMF is more for beginners might explain why not that many users here think it's necessary. As far as I can tell most Skritter users seem to have advanced levels and have mastered the pronounciation hurdle (although for anyone with a German background the pinyin is learnable in less than an hour because is near identical as far as the pronounciation is concerned).

Most real beginners probably start off with some book they received once and don't start their first lessons here (I hope that as Skritter gains in reputation teachers will send their students here from the beginning....I know I would have preferred that approach).

I agree with our tall teacher (gaolaoshi) and some of the other members: for me BPMF wouldn't really help me.

Zhuyin Fuhao is really useful if you live in Taiwan like me or plan to where so many locally produced learning materials (textbooks, dictionaries, story books, etc.) use zhuyin fuhao primarily or exclusively, and many teachers don't even know hanyu pinyin. All of my daughter's schoolwork uses zhuyin fuhao so I have had to learn it to be able to help her.

Every time I look at the forum thread list and see "bopomofo," I think it's an acronym for something, though I don't know what. Fun to think about, regardless.

It is the first four 'characters' of zhuyin fuhao. In hanyu pinyin they would correspond to the initial sounds b- p- m- f-.

That description is well, Chinese (or Taiwanese?) to me, but thanks.

Here I was expecting something like "Big orange pile of monkeys obstructing friggen oligarchy" or "Be on point or my old father obliterates."

But the real explanation works, too, I suppose.