Chinese, Japanese & Korean

Chinese and Japanese aren’t typed directly: you type a reading (pinyin, bopomofo, a radical code, romaji) and pick the character it means from a candidate bar. Korean is different: Hangul jamo assemble into syllable blocks on their own, so it types and suggests like any other language. This page covers both.

Screenshot pending

Chinese Pinyin: the candidate strip replaces the usual word-suggestion row while you're composing a reading.

Two different input flows

Conversion input methods (Pinyin, T9 Pinyin, Zhuyin, Cangjie, Cangjie Quick, Stroke for Chinese; Jyutping for Cantonese; Romaji, Flick, and Kana JIS for Japanese) hold what you type in a composing buffer and replace the entire suggestion strip with ranked character/word candidates. Nothing commits until you pick a candidate, press space, or otherwise flush the buffer.

Korean types the other way. HangulComposer composes jamo directly into syllable blocks (ㄱ + ㅏ + ㄴ → 간) with no reading step and no candidate list. There’s nothing to convert. Korean typing gets the ordinary word-suggestion and autocorrect strip instead, backed by a real downloadable dictionary (see Downloadable dictionaries). If you’ve used a Chinese or Japanese IME before, don’t expect Korean to work the same way: it’s a direct phonetic keyboard, not a conversion one.

Chinese input schemes

Enable Chinese from the language catalogue and you get six layouts, switchable per your typing style:

Layout	Reading unit	Buffer commits
Pinyin	Romanized syllables (ni, hao)	Prefix: a multi-syllable buffer offers the whole phrase plus its leading syllables
T9 Pinyin	Same syllables on a 9-key/T9 grid (ABC/DEF/GHI…)	Prefix
Zhuyin (Bopomofo)	ㄅㄆㄇㄈ… symbols, with four dedicated tone-mark keys (ˇˋˊ˙)	Prefix
Cangjie (倉頡)	Up to five radical keys, a–y, each printed as its radical glyph	Whole buffer: one code run is one character
Cangjie Quick (速成)	Just the first and last radical of a character	Whole buffer
Stroke (笔画)	Five stroke-class keys (一丨丿丶乙) plus a ＊ wildcard for an uncertain stroke	Whole buffer

Pinyin, T9 Pinyin, and Zhuyin are all prefix-commit: type nihao and the strip offers 你好 first, then leading-syllable candidates like 你 alone: tapping one only consumes the part of the buffer it covers and re-converts the rest, so you don’t have to clear the buffer between characters. Cangjie, Cangjie Quick, and Stroke are the opposite: shape and stroke codes map to exactly one character each, so a commit always consumes everything you’ve typed.

Zhuyin and T9 Pinyin don’t need their own dictionary; they reuse the Pinyin pack and translate each segmented syllable to its pinyin spelling. Cangjie and Cangjie Quick share one radical-code table. Stroke and Jyutping (below) each have their own pack.

Screenshot pending

Cangjie: radical keys build a shape code; the strip fills in once the code is complete.

Cantonese: Jyutping

Cantonese is a separate language entry (not a Chinese sub-option) with one layout: standard QWERTY plus a digit row for tone numbers 1–6. It’s a prefix-commit conversion scheme like Pinyin, with its own 163k-entry Jyutping→Hanzi dictionary.

Double Pinyin

For Pinyin typists who want fewer keystrokes, Double Pinyin encodes every syllable as exactly two keys (one for the initial, one for the final), which the composer expands to full Pinyin before segmenting as usual. Five real schemes are available: Microsoft, Sogou (identical key table to Microsoft), Xiaohe (小鹤), Ziranma, and Pinyin++. Turning one on replaces the syllable-typing rules on the same Pinyin layout; it isn’t a separate keyboard.

Fuzzy Pinyin and lazy Jyutping

Two independent toggles relax reading matching for imprecise typing:

• Fuzzy Pinyin treats commonly-confused sounds as equivalent (zh↔z, ch↔c, sh↔s, n↔l, an↔ang, in↔ing, and similar pairs), so a syllable typed loosely still finds its characters.
• Lazy pronunciation (懶音), Cantonese-only, matches the sound mergers common in Hong Kong speech: n↔l, an initial ng- that can drop entirely (我 ngo5 → o5), gw→g before -o, and the -ng/-n and -k/-t final pairs.

Both are off by default and only change ranking, not what you can type; a precisely-typed reading still works exactly as before.

Traditional characters and regional wording

A single toggle switches candidate output from Simplified to Traditional Han, applied character-by-character as each composer builds its candidate list (not as a find-and-replace afterward, which would break prefix-commit matching). The mapping is genuinely one character to many possible traditional forms depending on context: the keyboard picks the more common one, so occasional mismatches (like 发 mapping to 發 in most contexts but needing 髮 in a word like hair) are a known limitation, not a bug to report.

With Traditional on, a second control appears: a region picker (Standard / Taiwan / Hong Kong) that goes beyond character shape to swap regional vocabulary: Taiwan’s 計程車 instead of the mainland’s 出租車 for “taxi,” for instance. This affects whole dictionary words, not individual characters, so it only kicks in where the candidate is a complete match in the regional phrase table.

Both the Traditional toggle and the region picker also appear on the Japanese language screen, but they have no effect there. Japanese candidates never pass through this conversion at all.

Japanese input

Japanese ships three layouts, all feeding the same composer:

• Romaji — type romanized Japanese on a standard QWERTY layout; keystrokes transduce to hiragana as you type (handling doubled consonants as っ, disambiguating ん, and recognizing yōon combinations like きゃ).
• Flick — a 12-key pad with kana glyphs directly on the keys; flicking a key in a direction reaches its row-mates (あ flicks left/up/right/down to い/う/え/お).
• Kana JIS — each key emits a kana glyph directly, matching the physical JIS Japanese keyboard layout.

Screenshot pending

Japanese Flick: kana glyphs sit on the keys themselves, with directional flicks for the rest of the row.

All three read the same kana or romaji into JapaneseComposer, which converts kana readings to kanji/word candidates using a Mozc-derived dictionary. If nothing in the dictionary matches (or before you’ve downloaded the pack at all), the reading still commits as plain hiragana, katakana, or half-width katakana, so every Japanese layout works as a bare kana keyboard with zero setup.

The candidate bar

Whenever a conversion composer has a non-empty buffer, the usual word-suggestion strip is replaced by a horizontally-scrolling row of ranked candidates, sized to their text and packed from the left rather than evenly spaced or centered: the best candidate stays in a consistent spot instead of jumping around as the list length changes. A chevron at the end (outside the scrolling area, so it never scrolls off) opens an expanded view: a wrapping grid that covers the key rows while it’s open, the same way Sogou, Baidu, and QQ handle it: at this point you’re choosing a character, not typing one. There’s no page-by-page paging in either view, just scrolling.

Tapping a candidate (in the strip or the grid) resolves by its position in the ranked list, not by its text, because the same word can legitimately appear twice at different reading lengths (a Japanese reading might list 行 for both い and いき). Only the part of your typed buffer that candidate actually covers gets deleted; the rest re-converts. Pressing space is the fast path: it commits the top-ranked candidate for the leading syllable(s) and moves on, so repeated space presses walk a whole sentence through without ever opening the strip. No path here adds a trailing space, since Chinese and Japanese don’t put spaces between words. Any other commit (punctuation, Enter, moving the cursor, switching layout, or leaving the field) instead flushes the whole buffer by repeatedly taking the top candidate until nothing’s left, so you’re never stuck holding an unconverted reading.

If a reading has no dictionary match at all, it always falls back to committing what you typed as-is (raw pinyin letters, kana, or a stroke code) rather than trapping you in an empty buffer.

Screenshot pending

The expanded candidate grid: every ranked candidate, wrapped to fit, covering the key rows while it's open.

Learning from your picks

Every time you tap a candidate other than the top-ranked one, the keyboard remembers it. The next time the same reading comes up, your previously-chosen candidates move to the front (most-picked first) while everything else keeps the order the dictionary gave it. It’s a reordering of your own history, not a blended relevance score, so a candidate you’ve never picked never gets promoted just because it’s common in general.

Learning is scoped separately per reading system (pinyin, T9 Pinyin, zhuyin, jyutping, and Japanese kana readings each keep their own history), because the same word can be spelled several different ways depending on which Chinese scheme you’re using. Cangjie, Cangjie Quick, and Stroke don’t participate in learning at all: their radical and stroke codes map deterministically to one character, so there’s no ambiguity to learn from.

This history is governed by the same setting as ordinary word learning:

WM Keyboard›Privacy›On-device learning›Learn from typing

Turning it off, using incognito mode, or typing into a field that opts out of learning all stop new picks from being recorded, exactly as they do for the regular word suggestion history.

Options

WM Keyboard›Languages›(a CJK language)›(language) options

Opening a Chinese, Cantonese, or Japanese entry from the Languages screen shows a dedicated options group (this group doesn’t appear for Korean, since there’s no conversion dictionary to configure):

Setting	Default	Applies to
Conversion dictionary download	Not downloaded	Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese (see below)
Traditional characters	Off	Shown for Chinese, Cantonese, and Japanese; only has an effect on Chinese and Cantonese
Regional wording (Standard / Taiwan / Hong Kong)	Standard	Same, only shown once Traditional is on
Lazy pronunciation (懶音)	Off	Cantonese only
Fuzzy Pinyin	Off	Chinese only
Double Pinyin scheme	Off (full Pinyin)	Chinese only

To clear everything the keyboard has learned from your CJK picks:

WM Keyboard›Privacy›Your data›Clear learned words

This also clears your regular typed-word history and emoji usage in the same action: CJK picks live in their own file, so a future “clear learned words” tap intentionally names it explicitly rather than leaving it behind by accident.

Conversion dictionaries are downloads, not bundled data

None of the conversion dictionaries ship in the app. Until you download the matching pack, a conversion layout still composes and shows the buffer, but the candidate list stays empty.

Language	Pack	Approx. size	Coverage
Chinese	Pinyin (also covers Zhuyin & T9 Pinyin)	~2.5 MB	~120k entries, CC-CEDICT-derived
Chinese	Stroke	~450 KB	Stroke-order table
Chinese	Cangjie (also covers Cangjie Quick)	~350 KB	~29k characters
Cantonese	Jyutping	~3.4 MB	~163k entries
Japanese	Kana → kanji	~42 MB	~1.08M entries, Mozc-derived

Each download is checksum-verified before it’s used and, once on disk, needs no further network access. See Network policy for what the keyboard contacts and when, and Downloadable dictionaries for how the separate word-list system (which does have entries for plain Japanese and Korean word suggestions, just not for the conversion dictionaries here) works.

Details & edge cases

• A Japanese word-list download exists but does nothing for typing. Japanese has its own entry in the ordinary downloadable-dictionary catalog (see Downloadable dictionaries), but because Japanese is a conversion input method, the regular suggestion engine never runs for it. That download currently has no effect on any of the three Japanese layouts. Korean’s word list, by contrast, is fully active, since Korean isn’t a conversion method.
• The Traditional/region toggles show on the Japanese screen but are inert there. JapaneseComposer never applies the Han-variant conversion, so leave those settings alone if you’re a Japanese-only typist. They were placed above the Chinese-specific options rather than gated per-language, but they simply have nothing to act on for Japanese.
• Cangjie Quick needs the same dictionary as full Cangjie. With only one key typed, Quick behaves like an ordinary prefix search (the “last” radical isn’t known yet); the second key turns it into a first-and-last shape match, typically narrowing to a handful of candidates.
• The candidate depth differs by scheme. Pinyin, Zhuyin, T9 Pinyin, Jyutping, and Japanese all rank up to 100 deep in the expanded grid; Cangjie and Stroke, which look candidates up from a fixed code table rather than a ranked lattice, cap at 24.
• There’s no “lock” or “pin” on a candidate. Once you commit one, it only affects future ranking through the learning history above. There’s no separate pinning feature to hold a candidate in place.