Acceptable inputs for writing Chinese?

你好我的朋友！ Hey there, I already know a little bit about mandarin and I was wondering if Rocket Chinese might consider accepting the actual chinese characters for the writing sections of the lessons? I just change the keyboard settings in windows and it's easier to just input chinese characters directly then type out the pinyin, but Rocket Chinese only accepts pinyin...

I have a question on Lesson 1.1. When asking what is your surname, it is given as this: 你姓什么? Which shows 姓 as the correct character for xing. But when I look up in a on-line dictionary for Mandarin, I see many different Chinese words for yin. Instead of 姓 for surname, the dictionary gives 兴 as the correct character for the English word surname. I would be interested in input from others more experienced in Chinese as to what the difference is and which is correct and why.

你们好！ 谢谢 Timothy for your suggestion and I have passed that along to our technical and development team to see what we can do. Tom, 姓 is the only character that means "surname". It is important to remember that there is a huge variety of characters that take the same pinyin and should you search pinyin on the internet such as "xing", you will be provided with a plethora of different characters. The only way words can be distinguished is by their tones, characters and context. Nowadays, most Chinese words are now disyllabic which mean that they are made up from two characters which greatly reduces word confusion. I'm not sure what dictionary you used but I can assure you that 兴 does not mean surname. 希望这会帮你！I really hope this has cleared things up a little! - Lin Ping

谢谢, Lin. the dictionary I was using is MDBG.net . I would be interested in any comments you have about the quality of this resource.

你好Tom! A dictionary that I find very useful is www.nciku.com It is very comprehensive, has a lot of examples and also mobile versions that can be used offline. MDBG is good as well but not the best in my opinion. Give it a try and let me know what you think. - Lin Ping

谢谢你, that is very helpful. I like the option that nciku has to be able to write the characters also. At this stage of learning, that is very useful.

Hi Timothy, Thanks for your feedback on the keyboard. We are considering some alternative keyboard options for languages like Chinese but it's still a work in progress!

Thanks guys, I appreciate that. It's much easier for people to just han zi using Windows input than to write out correctly accented pinyin. I'm enjoying your program and I've recommended it to several of my friends. It's incredibly weird but cool that Lin Ping herself is responding to my forum questions!