Ok, now it’s two days later. Two days with hardly any sleep and constant starring at my computer screen. Which is beautiful, btw, this nano texture screen on my MacBook, I love it so much.

And a few walks in between, to think about how to fix the terrible problems I kept running into. Well… sometimes we need to slow down, so that solutions may come to us. I guess solutions, in their very nature, they also don’t like running targets.

I’ve been working on the numbers based input helper for about 3-4 months now, and I think it’s beautiful, too. I mean my frontend, which I can’t show you just yet.

It’s just… this entire idea of typing text using numbers seems flawed to me. I guess in this sense I’m pretty old school. In my mind and heart numbers and words are from two different realms. Nevertheless, it’s the most efficient input method.

But since I want to type text without using numbers I had to come up with an input scheme that can do just that.

This is why I developed my Twin Tone input scheme. The idea behind this scheme is that there’s no double vowels (twins) in the Chinese language, at least not in the romanised script called Pinyin.

This input scheme allows for writing Chinese (using Pinyin) without having to type numbers. There’s only one drawback: it’s terribly inefficient. A lot more characters have to be typed than result in actual text (depending on the text, there’s close to a 50% overhead).

That’s why I was trying hard to find an optimised, streamlined scheme. And to solve this problem, I used statistics. I had to find out which letter combinations are permissible for using in a Pinyin typing helper scheme.

The result of this work was my optimised Twin Tone input scheme. But the original design was very hard to implement from a software developer’s perspective. Therefore I created a much simplier variant, which I named, Twin Tone Variant (TTV). It’s a lot simpler, and also much easier to learn from a user’s perspective.

Turns out, this works very, very well. I’m very happy with it. And despite the slightly larger overhead, it’s more convenient to use than the numbers based input—since with TTV-Input the fingers can stay on the homerow on the keyboard.

So.

That’s my contribution from a teachers’ and inventors’ perspective. I blurred the input letter combination since it was so much work to find this scheme. Maybe in the future billions of people will use it. I probably should get it patented. But I have no idea how.

If you’re a business angel, investor, or startup incubator, I would like to team up with you; with me being Educational Director or Head of Innovation of a new Startup focusing on Chinese language related projects, all without Chinese characters.

Furthermore, I would like to start a Publishing company in Taiwan (for one, to have a legal basis for the work that follows, and secondly, to get temporary residency and a work permit for Taiwan.) But I’m open to other countries as well. Any help, a point in the right direction, or suggestions for partnering up are very welcome. 🙏😊