I’ve got an app that allows me to use pinyin typing keyboard and it’s ok, but it doesn’t allow for tones. I have to select the correct character from a huge list of all possible characters in all tones. My character knowledge is too weak for this however, I really need to be able to type the exact word. I’m using Android, thanks!
May I bump this? It’s hard to believe all the apps out there leave this out.
Ok, I’m not quite sure what your asking here. You want to type in pinyin like this “nǐhǎo” ? You can do that with your pinyin keyboard by holding down the letter you want the intonation for.
Or maybe you were hoping to type the tone to get less options to chose from thereby thinking typing characters will be easier? Not really, for some sounds with the same tones there’s a multitude of options anyways.
These state of the art input methods are already so smart that even if you make a mistake in typing they will almost always correctly guess what your saying
你明白我的意思
I just typed that out by writing “nmbwdys”
See what I’m saying, the input is already very user friendly. Typing out the tones would be redundant.
And also if you don’t know the characters what are you trying to type anyway?
There’s 365 days in a year, if you work on 10 characters a day you will be at 3650 characters in 1 year. Let’s say you actually retain about 1/3 of those 10, you will be at 1204.5 characters after only 1 year. Although there’s 50 000 some odd characters in existence maybe more , about 3000 characters will cover approximately 99% of modern written material. After 3 years you should be pretty comfortable reading and typing anything that crosses your path.
加油
Jy
下次再聊
xczl
Again look at that! You don’t even need the complete pinyin. It’s only hard for you to believe people haven’t made such apps because you don’t even realize how convenient it’s already been made.
You’re right, I’m simply a moron, how could I have not realized it before.
Interesting, however, that every chinese dictionary app I have ever seen does allow you to type in such as ni3hao3 in order to improve results. I guess they are all idiots too for taking the time to make that possible.
My apologies for desiring to be better able to communicate with my friends during the 3 years it might take me to become fluent in characters.
“Or maybe you were hoping to type the tone to get less options to chose from thereby thinking typing characters will be easier? Not really”
Why yes, if your reading comprehension were a bit stronger, this would not be a question at all, but a realization that this was quite blatantly the point of the question. Sorry, but for me, a reduction of up to 400% in the number of characters presented does indeed seem to help me make the right choice. And OFTEN the correct character is buried way down in the list, I have to scroll through dozens of choices before I find it. Even my Taiwanese friends, when I am stuck and I show them my results and ask them to find the character for me, sometimes have to spend several seconds looking around before they can find it.
So if there is anyone that isn’t a complete ass on here that can point me to a better typing app, I’d greatly appreciate it, thanks.
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Well, for what it’s worth, the Chinese pod team pretty much used my answer to this question as a intermediate lesson. You should check it out, it just reinforces what I said earlier. So I guess, inadvertantly, they’re calling you a moron as well, by your standards of course.
Gospel of Matthew Ch.7 V. 6
“Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”
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Quick Pinyin is a free, easy-to-use app that might be what the original poster is looking for. It will add tone marks by typing 1, 2, 3, 4 after the syllable. A nice feature is that adding the number after a syllable puts the tone mark where it’s supposed to go.
Here’s a download link: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/37827-quickpinyin-type-pinyin-with-tone-marks-portable/
When I want to type pinyin with tone.Firstly I type the chinese characters with Google IME (as you all probably do). Then I copy/paste the chinese text to my web browser open to https://translate.google.cn/
Click to the first icon Ä to show the pinyin. 
Finally I copy/paste the pinyin to my document.
The Google translation is not very good but the pinyin is correct.