Twenty-one years after the emergence of "Five Strokes" character input method, another original invention by Prof. Wang Yongmin was formally announced in Beijing on June 26. This new set of numeral keyboard-based Chinese character input method will enable cell phones to bid farewell to the "complicated and slow" Chinese character input method.

At the demonstration site in the Great Hall of the People, Wang Yongmin revealed the secrets of the Chinese character input technology to five academicians from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Unlike the "Five Strokes" font that needs to rely on 25 English letters, the code of the numerical Chinese character input method is composed of  nine digits (from 1 to 9), which totally tallies with the keyboard characteristics of equipments such as mobile phones, tax control machine and cash collector.

In China, short messages sent via mobile phones amount to 200 billion per year, but almost all the mobile phones depend on the "imported" Chinese character input method, by which one cannot avoid the frequent "rising strokes" process whether using pinyin (Chinese phonetic alphabet) or stroke input. After five years of endeavor, Wang Yongmin ingeniously integrated the structure of Chinese characters and Arabic numerals, and invented five new input methods from easy to difficult ones, greatly reducing the frequency of "rising strokes"; among the five methods, the "Wang Code 9 Keys" can input a maximum of 100 Chinese characters per minute. Moreover, the numerical Chinese character input method has the advantage of easier to learn than the "Five Strokes" font, three of the five methods can be mastered in five to 20 minutes. By the aid of "Numerical Five Strokes" method, one can even use the "Five Strokes" font to put in single Chinese characters and phrases on the cell phone at high speed.

The experts present at the press conference believe that, as the first serialized and digitalized Chinese character encoded input technology that is suitable for all the Chinese, this new invention will exert significant impacts on the standardization and development of the Chinese character input technology.

(People's Daily June 29, 2004)