How to type pinyin in Flikzi
- Switch to Chinese: flick the left space key up. The key shows 中.
- Type the pinyin without tones, for example nihao.
- Pick a candidate from the strip: whole-sentence candidates come first, then words.
- Choose in parts if you like: pick 你 first, and the strip moves on to candidates for hao.
- Carry on: after you commit, Flikzi predicts the characters likely to come next.
Punctuation switches to full-width forms in Chinese mode (，。！？). Press Enter to commit the raw letters instead of a candidate, which is handy for typing an English word without switching back.
Why offline pinyin matters
Many popular Chinese keyboards send what you type to a server to find better candidates. That is only as safe as the connection. In April 2024 the Citizen Lab tested cloud-based pinyin keyboards from nine vendors and found that eight had flaws that could let someone watching the network read the keystrokes. A year earlier it had found a similar problem in Sogou Input Method, since fixed.
Flikzi has no internet permission, so it has no cloud candidates to send your typing for. The dictionary and the engine are inside the app. How Flikzi’s privacy works.
What’s supported
- Simplified Chinese with full pinyin input.
- Sentence and word candidates, partial choosing, and predictions after each commit.
- Full-width punctuation in Chinese mode.
- Switching with a single flick, mid-sentence, as often as you need.
Not supported today: Traditional Chinese, zhuyin (bopomofo), handwriting and double pinyin (shuangpin).
The engine
Flikzi’s pinyin support is built on the Android Open Source Project’s PinyinIME decoder and its dictionary, released under the Apache License 2.0 and adapted to run inside Flikzi. Open-source licences.