I’m practicing Shuangpin, a Chinese input method.
纸砚 is an excellent website for learning Shuangpin. Two days ago, I spent about 20 minutes on it and managed to memorize the vowel chart without using any mnemonics—enough to type, albeit haltingly.
This isn’t about efficiency. It’s purely an experiment. I find it fascinating, like learning a new language.
When we use Chinese, three elements are at play: semantics → phonetics → glyphs. With alphabetic languages like English, phonetics and written forms are isomorphic, so it seems like semantics → phonetics is sufficient.
Now with Shuangpin, I’m adding another translation layer. I need to convert phonetics into positional coordinates before I can output text—that is, semantics → phonetics → position → glyphs. I hope that once I become proficient, I can bypass the phonetic layer entirely and go straight to semantics → position → glyphs.
The purpose of this experiment is to see what effect this has on me.
One effect I can already feel: my hands now firmly occupy the home row position, with each finger making minimal movements. This is completely different from the wide, sweeping motions of typing with full Pinyin.
These few short paragraphs took me ages to write, and my head is throbbing. There’s a financial term that perfectly captures how I feel right now—stagflation. My thought output is stagnating while my brain is inflating.
It’s a bit like learning piano for the first time. The difference is that with piano, the sheet music and tempo are given by someone else—if you can’t keep up with the rhythm, you crash immediately. It’s an external collapse. But with Shuangpin typing, thoughts linger in your mind, unable to pour out, until they eventually dissolve into foam and vanish.