Pinyin Traditional MessagEase

Great concept, poor execution. 1 star because it's unusable. Here are 2 main reasons why this feature of Messages is not useful: 1) There are five different accents for every sound in chinese, namely the -, ˊ, ˇ, ˋ, ˙ accents. Normally, when you use pinyin, you key in english letters and then add one of these 5 accents to narrow down the possible word choices. Messages doesn't provide the option of adding these accents, so when I try to type Pinyin, I always find myself with too many possible word choices. This makes typing chinese slow and cumbersome. 2) Some sounds are very common in chinese. Pinyin, by nature, uses the sound of a chinese word to search for and type the word. Therefore, if you happen to be looking for a word that has a very common sound but is very infrequently used, you might need to search through all the possibilities (which could be 3 pages long) to find it. When I try to use Pinyin in Messages, it unfortunately truncates the possible word list, so it's IMPOSSIBLE to type uncommon words with common sounds. I can't type the word 倞, for example. I love Messages (gave it 5 stars), but this feature is just ineffective. Will change to 5 stars they fix it.

I use it, but I agree with Ray that it isn't very effective. Long lists of words to select from--thus quite slow. Also, you cannot get words like travel (Lu you) or woman (Funu) since it uses the german "ü" and not the regular "u". Those words never show up, so you have to get creative to communicate without words that have that sound. This is for the simplified pinyin (but probably the same in traditional).