Chinese (simplified - pinyin) keyboard on iPad ignoring input

When I type using the Chinese pinyin keyboard, whether with the smart folio keyboard, on-screen keyboard, or an external bluetooth keyboard, I will constantly have issues where I’ll type out a few characters, for example /nǐhǎo/ (你好, “hello”), and even though I can see every letter I’ve typed on the screen, the suggestions will appear as if I’ve only typed half of those letters.

Let me illustrate:

I type shishi and then I look for the characters I want, in this case 事实 (“fact”). Other options that could pop up include 试试, 实施, 实时, 时时, etc., which all use those same letters in pinyin. Maybe once every three times I type, though, I’ll see options that seem to suggest that I didn’t write shishi, but instead something like sshi, even though I can still see the letters shishi written, so I’ll get options like 啥事, 随时, etc., just as an example. The letters that seem to be ignored will be treated as the same letter as that initial ‘s,’ they can be a random number - most of the time between 2-6 letters, and every single time, I have to backspace and delete the whole thing before I can get it to recognize the input how I want it, which is incredibly frustrating and it wastes a lot of time.

I’ve looked in settings, and there doesn’t seem to be anything about this. This behavior can’t be based off of usage, because I almost always type everything out in pinyin (rather than using shortcuts for really common combinations like many Chinese type now), and I don’t know why it’s like this, but it’s been this way since I bought it last December.

For context, I bought my iPad in China, but there shouldn’t be a reason that it would type like that. It acts a lot differently from many of the pinyin keyboards on Windows, for example.

Any help figuring out why this is happening and what I can do to stop it would be greatly appreciated, thank you.