Knowledge 知識 : CangJie 倉頡

There are many different ways of inputting Chinese on a computer. At a high level, they can be split into phonetic methods, such as Zhuyin/Bopomofo, Tongyong pinyin, and Hanyu pinyin, and graphical methods, of which I believe the most popular is CangJie 倉頡.

One large advantage of graphical methods such as CangJie is that, unlike phonetic methods, the input code generally specifies the exact desired character, whereas in phonetic methods you have to pick out the character out of a list of all characters that match the input code, which can often be time consuming for less common characters. Therefore, it is faster to type in CangJie than in a phonetic method.

The other advantage of using CangJie is that it helps to remember how to write the characters, since the code is based on the decomposition of the character into its parts. For this reason, it is helpful to people learning Chinese. Unfortunately, I have not found very many resources in English dedicated to learning CangJie. This page is dedicated to collecting information on CangJie that can be used for those learning Chinese, e.g. pages that are already in English or that require a limited amount of Chinese to understand.

One of the most useful pages is this webpage giving a fairly detailed explanation of CangJie in English. There's also an associated book, but the only way to get it is to contact the author directly, which I have not tried to do, so I can't say if that's still available or not.

Also very useful is this CangJie typing tutor. In the tutor, you select the particular exercise you want to do from the drop box. Unfortunately, I can't help you understand the explanatory text on the right since I don't understand it myself. Two things that may help: First, make sure that the focus is on the left box with the text, otherwise it won't respond to your typing. Second, when typing actual text, the way to do it is to type the letters that you think will generate the word. If you are incorrect, it won't show anything other than to increase the count at the bottom of the box showing how many letters you have tried to input. Once you think you have finished the input code for the character, hiting space will move you to the next character if you are correct.

Here is someone else's list of CangJie-related resources. I haven't looked through it very closely, but maybe there will be something of interest.

Here is an explanation of CangJie in Chinese. Again, I haven't looked too closely at it, but it seems to be fairly useful if you can decipher a little bit of the Chinese.

This is a very useful page - Follow Me倉頡字典. You enter in one character in Chinese in the text box on the main page, click the button, and it will bring you to a page showing the correct CangJie input code for the character, along with a complete explanation for why that is the code. In particular, it shows you how the character is decomposed into regions (e.g. three vertical components), the codes that match each region (e.g. the first and last codes of the first component, the first and last codes of the second component, and the last code of the third component), and why that particular code is used (i.e. the correct variation of that particular code).

Here is a closely related page - 倉頡字典. The difference between this page and the one above is that you can input a string of characters into the main text box, and it will give you the CangJie codes for all of the characters in the string. In addition, if you click on "拆碼" under the "More" column, it will take you to the detailed explanation for that character on the above Follow Me webpage.