Wait hold on I just realized. Is

八人入

A reasonable Chinese sentence

…Also waaaa why did the character rendering change so much when I copied from Pleco to Tusky. Who gave eight a hat

In Pleco they look like this. I don't know if this is a different but regular hanzi font or if the CJK unification is messing me up somehow

EDIT: I currently think Tusky is showing me Japanese character variants https://social.mildlyfunctional.gay/@artemist/116146010272716935

This is what Tusky looks like.
WAIT WTF this is an actual Chinese IME and it seems to be showing me Japanese characters. Ok I think Lenovo is fucking with me, one minute

Okay I now believe the problem is neither Tusky nor Lenovo but rather that Android is not a serious product and never has been. It seems Android may outright refuse to show scripts unless you've whitelisted the language. Problem: I think this menu is asking me which version of Chinese I want but the menu is in Chinese. I want to look at Chinese text so I can learn Chinese. I don't know it yet. I feel like I'm playing an adventure game.

* I may explore a PR later anyway.

Actually I'm pretty sure 简 already means simplified, so I selected simplified at the top level, and this second menu is asking… I don't know. Locale? TTS dialect?!
Update: I solved the problem, not by adding Chinese as an alternate language for my Android, but by deleting Japanese as an alternate language. Not sure when I added Japanese in the first place or what I was trying to accomplish but I question Google's decision that informing it I may look at text in Japanese makes it conclude I DEFINITELY won't be looking at Chinese!
Anyways I think the sentence was wrong to start with because it's missing 个s or something

鸡机

Attempting to imagine the Chicken Machine

@mcc fun fact 雞雞 is baby talk for penis lol
@mcc one needs not imagine the chicken machine https://youtu.be/dl9beG4LbJU
chair chicken

YouTube
@mcc I would love to understand this joke, but the present lack of context is good too, lol.

@mcc

From what I understand, the 个 is not optional and must be included except that it’s entirely optional and is dropped half the time or something.

@rk love this!!! no idea what this means (sorry to barg in the thread door) but will pinch this 个 and use for houses 😁 (or as fancy arrow)
@mcc
@Heliograph @rk The 个 is a friend that you give to a number so that it does not get lonely
@mcc @Heliograph @rk I prefer to think of it as the units people (and other things) come in. As in, “Going down to the bar to drink a couple of pints, and maybe bring back a ge or two.”
@mcc @Heliograph @rk my mind went immediately to Knuth up-arrow, which gives numbers lots of friends
@mcc @Heliograph @rk
It's a Totoro umbrella.

@mcc hmm, to me (learned Mandarin as a first language in parallel with English but am now extremely rusty) it reads as archaic but understandable; I think the use of 入 as a standalone verb also contributes here? like for something like “eight people entered [the room]” my natural translation would be 八个人进去了 (or 进来了, depending on my perspective)

god I need to find an excuse to properly unrust my Mandarin

@Gaelan Gaelan how do you feel about wuxia and/or girls who are really really *really* good friends
@mcc uh, I’m not particularly familiar with Wuxia but am myself a girl who is really^3 good friends with a number of girls
@Gaelan i was gonna recommend a Chinese net animation called soulmate adventure / 风灵玉秀 which is a very cute, everyone-claims-this-is-GL YA-ish adventure series about two young female kung fu masters traveling together. bilibili used to have a youtube video with the entire first season but they took it down
@mcc the witch who cursed you: this isn't what I anticipated at all
@mcc I have to wonder if this is downstream of Unicode's choices around CJK unification. Because I seem to remember reading that it ended up causing some situations where, in order to correctly render a block of text, you need out-of-band knowledge of which language it's in.

@rachelplusplus
Yeah, I remember this from doing some i18n work, and the Wikipedia article appears to agree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs

@mcc

CJK Unified Ideographs - Wikipedia

@mcc isn’t this more of a font issue? i was sure having seen 八 and 入 with top hook in chinese subtitles sometimes
@mcc unfortunately there’s not really a good solution to this problem and Android, like everyone else, just has to pick a resolution method and stick with it. If you’ve heard of “Han Unification,” well it sounds like something that happened violently in 2200 BC but actually it happened quite recently in a Unicode meeting room and it causes this exact specific intractable issue
@0xabad1dea @mcc also an act of violence, I would argue

@0xabad1dea @mcc I suppose the only actually reliable approach would be to store the IME locale per character or something so that it can be accurately rendered as it was written... or are these truly identical graphemes, and there's no chance of confusion in context? Even when people use multiple languages simultaneously?

(late edit after reading a lot more: ah, I see they DID just add a variant-selector character to effectively specify the locale... that seems a bit unlikely to gain major use, but technically I like it I guess)

Maybe one day we'll have UTF-8-2 and it'll just be infinitely extendable, rather than using a limited length prefix.

@groxx @0xabad1dea There are various existing solutions but just because the solutions exist does not mean people follow them corectly
@mcc @0xabad1dea definitely agreed. even technically, it seems very unlikely to me that any IME is going to choose to, like, add variant selectors *to every single character* and confuse their users when it's blended with other text or in a size-limited scenario. those characters already take up a ton of space, making it worse won't go over well.