For those reading on the English-language Planet Fedora, I’m trying to learn how to participate in the Chinese-language Fedora community, and chronicling my adventures (as usual) as I go along.

Kin Chew posted instructions on how to enable Chinese character input in Fedora 11 – I should screencast an F12 version now that the new release is out. But thanks to Kin Chew’s instructions, I’ve finally started typing in Chinese – less than 5 minutes from beginning to read his post to typing 谢谢 (thank you) in a comment, including the reboot. My prior adventures in that language have all involved either dead trees or individual copy-pasting of characters from online dictionaries. Yes, it’s painful; that’s why my prior online output in Chinese probably numbers less than 100 characters.

Ah, the power of documentation. See, it’s not that this was hard – but prior to Kin Chew’s post, Chinese input was (1) something I didn’t need to do, and was interested enough to maybe spend 10 minutes trying to figure out, and (2) something that took me more than 10 minutes to figure out, and therefore something that I didn’t do. And I keep reminding myself that this is what it feels like for new people looking at joining the projects that I care about.

Next steps: figuring out how to make Chinese characters display correctly in GNOME Terminal and Konsole so I can see #fedora-zh without having to fire up xchat separately (I use irssi and screen for IRC), then figuring out how to tweak and run lingobot so I can understand #fedora-zh without having to pile through my dictionary all the time. I have a grasp of enough basic grammar that a word-for-word translation should enable me to begin squeaking by – vocabulary is my main deficiency at the moment.