How do Chinese users enter Chinese words?

Question

I've seen how Chinese type using a basic "ASCII" keyboard, but how does it really work? What's the approach behind this? You can see different letters are typed, and then a Chinese character is chosen from a list of alternatives...

Also, isn't there a better keyboard than the US one, optimized for Chinese writing?

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

There are many ways of entering Chinese characters on an ASCII keyboard. Roughly, each ASCII key is assigned to represent some basic pronunciation, thus when you type a combination of ASCII keys, you are building a Chinese character. Often there are more than one character that match the key stroke combination, so you have to choose using numerical keys or similar.

E.g. when you type "fei", you get a whole bunch of characters that share this same pronunciation, one of which means "fly" and another meaning "fat", quite interesting, isn't it?

Alternatively you can build a character from shape. It's supposed to be faster, but I guess few people are using it except those professional typists.

As far as I know there really isn't any "better" keyboard than the US one optimized for Chinese writing, although some keyboards have special marks on the keys to remind you what they are for in Chinese typing, especially when you build a character from "shape".

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Asker's Comment:

Excellent answer!

Answer 2

There are different ways to type Chinese.

1. MS Pinyin--> I use this one at work.
This kind of system doesn't reuire special keyboards. For example, if you want to type "Hello" in Chinese, which is "Ni Hao". You can just tyep "Ni Hao". Your key stoke will be n-i-2-h-a-o-2.
(The number stands for the tone; there are 4 tones plus one netural tone). Then the computer will automatically choose the best word for you. If not, you can change from the list.

2. Taiwanese pinyin (Phonetic)
This kind of typing requires special keyboard, which shows the symbols on the keyboard. The idea is similar to the first one, however, instead of using alphabets, Taiwanese pinyin has its special symbos to stand for each sound.

3. Chang Jie
This kind of typing also requires special keyboard. The special symbols on the keyboard stand for the part of a character. Chinese characters is composed of one or more components.

If you use the first and second one, sometimes you need to change the character the computer chooses for you because in Chinese different characters share the same sound.

Source(s):

Myself, typing Chinese every day.

Answer 3

There's a very detailed article, including some interesting links, in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers

Source(s):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers

Answer 4

yeah probably but they also probably just have computers and keyboards made for the Chinese language.