Pinyin input method

The obvious advantage of pinyin-based input methods the ease of learning for Standard Chinese speakers.

In addition, since the input method only supports one character at a time, it likely requires the user to type out the full pinyin spelling to narrow down the selection.

The method attempts to guess the appropriate characters by using word phrases from a dictionary, grammatical structure, and context.

Many of the early single-character pinyin method implementations required input of tones in order to narrow down the character selection.

For the sake of convenience, tone selection is disabled by default in most modern pinyin systems on the computer.

For example, typing "nv" into the input method would bring up the candidate list for pinyin: nǚ.

Some IMEs, such as Google Pinyin, merge it into "e", while others create an additional letter combination for it, such as "ea" or "eh", or "ei" in iOS.

The character 嗯 (ng) can (or should[5]) be written using the IBUS GNU/Linux and the Microsoft input method by typing "en".

In systems that support user-defined phrases, users can even define their own abbreviations that might not follow standard pinyin rules.

This means that a significant number of Mandarin speakers would have trouble distinguishing a number of similar-sounding syllables of pinyin, such as c and ch, s and sh, z and zh, n and ng, h or hu and f, or n and l. Fuzzy pinyin or fuzzy input (模糊音) is a feature that allows a user to input those similar-sounding vowels or consonants as if they were the same thing.

For example, when the user enters "shang", the input method would show "上海" (Shanghai) as a word candidate under this feature.

Most advanced pinyin method implementations allow the mixing of English into an input stream without requiring the user to change the language mode.

The following examples show the difference if user wishes to enter "这个SQL漏洞可以瘫痪整个系统。" (This SQL vulnerability could paralyze the entire system.