I have a few friends that are Chinese and I find it fun to chat to them (or at least try to chat to them) on the computer via MSN and the likes using their native Chinese language. Initially I was using the Windows handwriting recognition IME (input method editor) to enter things in Chinese using the mouse, but I found this to be quite time consuming for long conversations and a little frustrating on the occasions when the computer was unable to decipher my handwriting.

Another option was to use the phonetic IME to enter words in Chinese meaning that you would type in the words more-or-less as they sounded using the standard English alphabet. Although this method is undoubtedly faster to input Chinese text, I have the problem that the standard Chinese phonetic IME is based on Mandarin Chinese and not Cantonese which is what I am used to.

As an example (which means I'm fine) in Cantonese would be ngo han hou, but in Mandarin Chinese it would be wo hen hao. For some reason Cantonese sadly seems to get very little support, not just with IMEs but in a lot of other areas too. I have never been able to find anywhere local to me that teaches Cantonese although there are plenty of places offering Mandarin Chinese courses. Yeah I could try and learn Mandarin, but I thought that there must be an easier way.

After a hunt about the internet I eventually came across the website http://cpime.hk dedicated to a phonetic IME specifically for Cantonese speakers. If you look at the download section of the CPIME (Cantonese Phonetic IME) page you will see that there are four download options:

You have the option of downloading CPIME with Standard Cantonese Pinyin, Yale, Jyutping or Sidney Lau romanisations depending on what your preference is. Personally I am more used to the Yale system so I will just deal with that one here.

Once downloaded you will need to unarchive the CPIME folder. Installation is very straightforward and all that is involved is right-clicking on the file called Install_CPIME.INF and then clicking Install from the pop-up menu.

The next step is to configure Windows to use the CPIME. The instructions here are for Windows Vista, but the process is similar for Windows XP. There are Windows XP specific instructions on the CPIME website.

First of all open the Windows Control Panel:

Double click on the Regional and Language Options icon:

Here we want to click the Keyboards and Languages tab and then click the Change keyboards... button:

Now click the Add... button:

At this point browse through the language list until you find Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong S.A.R.), expand it and then tick the Cantonese Phonetic IME (CPIME) option. Now click OK:

As you can see the CPIME has been now been added. Click the OK button to finish off.

Now to give CPIME a quick test drive!

Open up an application such as WordPad. In the language bar you should see the letters EN (for non-English systems this will be different). Click on this and you will be presented with a pop-up menu with the different language options:

Select ZH Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong S.A.R.).

If you start typing something like ngo into the WordPad window you will see a bar appear with various Chinese characters in it:

You can either use the space bar to go through the different characters (of which there may be more than one page) or you can press the corresponding number to enter the character. The one we are looking for is the first one so just press 1 on the keyboard:

And there you go, you have just entered the Chinese character for I or me!

There are a couple of things that I really like about the CPIME. The first is that it knows common phrases such as sang yat faai lok (which means happy birthday):

The second is that it also includes an English dictionary so that you can type in English words and it will give you possible Chinese equivalents:

Another nice feature is that you can also switch between Chinese input and English input by pressing CTRL-J on the keyboard.

By default the keyboard input uses a US layout. I found this a little annoying since I use a UK keyboard. I contacted the CPIME developer regarding this and he was more than helpful to instruct me on how to change the keyboard layout.

The keyboard layout is defined in the Install_CPIME.INF file at lines 45 and 50 and can be changed editing KBDUS.DLL at these lines to KBDUK.DLL. Once this is done just install the IME using the same method as already mentioned.