best android keyboard for English/Chinese?

erans

Member
I'm going nuts trying to find a good keyboard that does both English and Chinese. The best I've found is Smart Keyboard Pro, but it's not perfect--if you type ZMY and select 怎么 for the ZM, the Y is just gone and you have to retype it. I hate switching input methods, so I'm trying to find one that does both English and Chinese. There's a modified version of the Gingerbread keyboard on the Market that seems pretty good, but there is no Chinese language pack for it so it's no good.

What does everyone use?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Have you tried Baidu? Pretty nice switching, plus you can handwrite on top of the keyboard, and it's free.
 

erans

Member
Hi everyone, thought I'd revive this thread.

Mike, you're right, Baidu is probably the best for pure Chinese input. But its English is still far behind the best Android keyboards (Swiftkey).

Swiftkey still doesn't have Chinese support, for some reason, but this alternative keyboard called Kii Keyboard has been getting very popular. It's great for English and can also be themed to look like the stock JB keyboard. It handles Chinese pretty well, though the candidate selection needs some work--you can't view all the possible candidates for each syllable, which is sort of dumb. I've raised this in the XDA thread for Kii so I hope the developer tries to make the Chinese input as good as Baidu or the iOS keyboard (I haven't used iOS that frequently, but when I have, the pinyin IME always seemed top-notch.)

Anyway, just thought I'd bump this thread to suggest Kii to frustrated folks who hate switching between Baidu and SwiftKey. If anyone has found a better alternative, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

Also, can this thread please be moved to the Android section? I know it isn't a Pleco for Android question, but this might reach more people in that forum. Thanks.

Kii Keyboard link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zl.inputmethod.latin&hl=en
 

erans

Member
Google Pinyin is much, much better now than it was a year ago--it's what I've been using lately. Its English prediction/input is a bit better than TouchPal or any of the really good Chinese IMEs, but its Chinese input isn't quite as good as the best Chinese IMEs, like Baidu. I wish there was a keyboard that had great Chinese/English input (Baidu/Swiftkey). I'm surprised there isn't anything like this yet.
 
+1 for Swype.

It has handwriting recog, simplified and traditional input (including bopomofo and pinyin) as well as a tonne of other stuff. Hands down the best Multilanguage keyboard going. It also has a month long free trial, which I'm almost certain has every feature of the paid version too.
 

alex_hk90

状元
TouchPal for me as well, mainly because of the features for English though (both its swipe and word prediction/learning works extremely well for me).
 
+1 for TouchPal

It's a lot like SwiftKey, if you've ever used that. Only it has excellent Chinese input as well since the people that make it are Chinese.
 

Miguel

状元
It does, and it is much faster than Touchpal. At the beginning I was missing a few features but Swype has other very cool ones too (check the shortcuts they have).
 

ozinchina

Member
I've been using the GO keyboard witch also has swipe/ predictive/ pinyin/English/other language choices if you ae not a native English speaker and hand writing characters

can lock down to predict two/three syllabic Chinese words and usually pops up most commonly used
 
Top