<p>Hi, it's my first time taking the AP chinese test and I looked over the questions a bit. The reading/listenting/answering section seem to be no problem at all, but when I looked over the "wrting/typing" part I began to have some doubts. For the chinese typing program can you type chinese not taiwanese ping yin and then put the 4 accents on it? How long do those free response sections have to be? I am a native speaker, but I dont think the typing is very easy. any comments? the free response can only be a few sentences for like "making up a short story based on these pictures" or "relay the phone message back to the other guy". much appreciated!!</p>
<p>You can use hanyu pinyin or regular bopomofo when you type. It takes a lot of practice to get fast however, so I would practice a lot before going into the test. The free response should be about 200 characters each. More is better than less in this case.</p>
<p>Hope that helped.</p>
<p>I heard 150 words is enough too. Also there is a cultural presentation apparently.</p>
<p>native speaker? you’ll do just fine (besides, just check out last year’s curve 80+% got 5’s)</p>
<p>I, on the other hand, will end up in the 1-2 range…</p>
<p>Bump this question.
I’m taking the late test, and I’m also wondering about the typing program. So when you type in pin-ying for one character, does the program give you a bunch of charaters to choose from? Or you can type in a word group (such as “bei zi” [cup]), and the program give you the characters for that? I looked on college board and didn’t find an answer to this. Is there a program that I can download from the internet to practice on?</p>
<p>^i heard there’s multiple kinds of typing methods, so no worries.
as long as u know how to type pinyin, u’ll be okay</p>
<p>Yeah, I took it this year, and we had the option of typing pinyin or bopomofo</p>
<p>Can you describe how the typing works? I have typed Chinese on a computer once and that was almost ten years ago. What’s bopomofo?</p>
<p>bopomofo is a pretty complicated way of typing chinese (i think its also called wade-giles). there are specialty keyboards (normal qwerty keyboards) that had fundamental strokes next to letters and you use it to make characters. to me, it seems really hard</p>
<p>i would assume that most people just type pinyin, since its really easy to learn and goes a lot faster than bopomofo just based on the people ive seen do both.</p>