Why with Article 1: Vietnamese Quick-Writing (vqw)?

Dear readers.

Back in 1976, I chanced to borrow a library’s book by the title “Vấn đề cải tiến chữ quốc ngữ”^(1). Leafing over its table of contents, I got much surprised, because in my then knowledge, with the language’s established and supposedly perfect writing system, why these scholars need such a seminar⁽²⁾ on the system at all, really puzzled me.

The book in fact pointed out a great many inadequacies in the Vietnamese writing, and presented several suggestions for improvements and rationalization, which had been available by that time.
Finishing the book, I realized that the “national characters” system did have its imperfections. I then pondered if there were some ways to get it rationalized and more streamlined? I have finally come up with a 52-syllable quick-writing method that reduces 4- or 3-character syllables down to just 2-character ones.
In recent times, more and more Vietnamese have gone online and start chatting or simply texting on a hand phone. Traditional writing system causes them a lot of trouble when keying in long syllables of 3 or 4 characters. This “difficulty” prompted me to devise this “Vietnamese Quick-Writing” to reduce many a syllable into its simple 2-character substitute. That was the starting point of my first article “Vietnamese Quick-Writing” 2 years ago.
Why with Article 2: New method of Vietnamese Quick-Typing ?

I have posted “VQW” on quite a few forums home and abroad, one of which being WinVNKey’s (http://winvnkey.sf.net).

In trying different options to integrate the Quick Vietnamese Writing’s proposed suggestion into WinVNKey, a question now arose: which accent typing method would be the quickest and best suited?

Quite a few people write Vietnamese texts without accents in e-mails and online chatting. This practice gives more speed and confidence that a message can be read by any receiver, and never risks producing “Sanskrit-like” characters displayed on a different computer.

WinVNKey is a multi-purpose keyboard with various useful functions for which not many other keyboards support.

On WinVNKey’s home page, the reader can find its User Guide at “Online Manual”. These instructions are written in English and designed to address advanced users who have interests in more in-depth features.

With Dr Ngô Đình Học’s approval, I have compiled the article “Express Manual for WinVNKey” at a more user-oriented standpoint helping Vietnamese layman users learn to download the application and familiarize themselves with its basic and useful features.

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  Multi-purpose keyboard WinVNKey.
  
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  Vietnamese writing’s rationalization.
  
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  Vietnamese-writing in @-era.
  
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  Small tips.
  

Your feedback and corrections will be much appreciated.

© Trần Tư Bình

Web: Chữ Việt Nhanh http://chuvietnhanh.sf.net

Email: tubinhtran@gmail.com

(1) “The Issue of Rationalizing the Vietnamese Writing System”, Van Hoa Publisher, Ha Noi, 1961.