Before I left Vancouver for Mexico I made a Taiwanese
friend who, when explaining the pronunciation of the
Chinese characters in some word, wrote it in bopomofo.
I'd never seen anyone actually use it before. A bit
later I made another Taiwanese friend who had an
electronic dictionary similar to the Japanese and
Korean ones I'm familiar with, but I'd never seen a
Chinese one before. This one actually had a bopomofo
keyboard. I asked and was told that indeed bopomofo is
the normal way to type on computers also in Taiwan.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. I thought that in
Taiwan everybody spoke the local Chinese "dialect"
and was later educated in Mandarin and that the
traditional characters are used there. Does anybody
know if they would be typing the bopomofo
pronunciation
for the local "dialect" or Mandarin? If Mandarin then
uneducated people would not be able to use computers,
electronic dictionaries, etc. This problem was avoided
in Hong Kong by using input methods based on the
script rather than the sounds of any particular
"dialect". Is this right?


http://en.wiktionary.org -- http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl



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