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Wubi 86, 98 and New Century — which one should you actually learn

September 20, 2026 · about 720 words · Wubi

Wubi (五笔) is a shape-based input method for Chinese: instead of typing a pronunciation, you type the components a character is built from. A trained Wubi typist can exceed 100 characters per minute, and — the reason professionals still use it — can type characters they would not know how to pronounce.

There are three versions in circulation, and they assign different codes to the same components. Choosing wrong does not ruin anything, but it costs you the months spent memorising radicals.

What the versions are

All three use the same five-zone keyboard layout and the same basic idea. They differ in which component is assigned to which key, and in the detailed splitting rules for ambiguous characters.

The deciding factor: support, not quality

Here is the uncomfortable truth about choosing: 98 and New Century are technically better designs. They fix a number of inconsistencies in 86 — components that 86 assigns to surprising keys, and splitting rules with awkward exceptions.

It does not matter, because what you actually need is:

1. Your input method to ship the version. Every major IME (Microsoft, Sogou, QQ, Rime) ships 86 by default. 98 and New Century are usually an optional download or a config switch, and on some platforms they are not available at all.
2. Phrase dictionaries. The speed advantage of Wubi comes largely from typing multi-character phrases as a single unit. Those phrase tables are overwhelmingly built for 86.
3. Other people's computers. If you ever type on a machine you do not control — an office workstation, a library terminal, a colleague's laptop — 86 is there and the others are not.

A method you cannot use everywhere is not faster in practice, however elegant it is.

Who still uses Wubi, honestly

Wubi is a minority method. Pinyin input accounts for roughly 90% of Chinese typing, and Wubi users skew older — the method was standard in the 1990s and early 2000s, before pinyin IMEs became good enough to make shape-based input unnecessary for most people.

It survives in specific niches where it is genuinely superior:

• Professional transcription and data entry, where throughput matters and the text is known.
• Legal, medical and classical-text work, where characters are encountered that the typist cannot pronounce. Pinyin is useless for a character you cannot read; Wubi is not.
• Anyone who finds candidate selection tiring. Pinyin requires choosing from a list of homophones; Wubi usually does not.

If you are learning Chinese as a second language, note the trade-off carefully: Wubi does not teach you pronunciation, and pinyin does. For a learner, pinyin is usually the better first input method, and Wubi is a later optimisation.

How to choose

Learn 86 unless you have a specific reason not to. Specific reasons that genuinely justify another version:

• Your workplace standardises on a different version and provides the dictionaries.
• You already learned 98 or New Century years ago and are returning to it.

That is close to the complete list.

The one thing worth doing first

Before committing months, spend an hour with the radical chart and see whether the method suits you at all. Wubi requires memorising roughly 200 component-to-key assignments. Some people find that trivial and some find it unbearable, and the difference is not correlated with general ability.

The radical drills in the practice panel start from the five-zone structure rather than from rote lists, which makes that first hour much more informative than staring at a chart. If the coordinate logic clicks, Wubi will suit you. If it feels arbitrary after an hour, use pinyin — that is a legitimate outcome and not a failure.

Switching versions later

Possible, and less painful than learning from scratch, because the five-zone skeleton transfers. What does not transfer is the specific key assignments and the exceptions. Expect to re-learn perhaps half the character repertoire, and expect a frustrating month where your fingers produce 86 codes while you are thinking in the new version.

This is a good argument for choosing deliberately up front rather than discovering later that your chosen version is unsupported on the machine you use most.