Chinese: How do people write Chinese characters on a computer?

Question

This is my first question, and I did search to see if I could find an answer, but alas, no luck. How is Chinese written onto the WWW? How is it even put into a PC. I can't imagine how a keyboard would even look!

I can speak some Chinese and I can even read very simple Chinese. I can speak and write Thai as well. I can see how Thai is written into a keyboard, but since there are so many characters, how is it that people can put things on the web?

Lastly, where would you recommend I would begin to start learning how to write Chinese characters into the computer?

Answer 1

Well, if you want to get the idea on how it's done you can go to this website: http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/ime.html
You don't have to download anything and there are instructions on how to use it at the bottom.

Then, if you want to download a program, you can search for "google pinyin" and then download that. Or here is a link if you want: http://tools.google.com/pinyin/

It's pretty easy. You just switch from English to Chinese by pressing the blue square botton on your tool bar that says "En" and then start typing away in pinyin. Once you press the space button it converts to hanzi. If there's more than one character you can use for a word then a menu will pop up for you to choose from.

Answer 2

1

Answer 3

There are probably at least a dozen ways to rapidly write Chinese on computers. The slowest way, which is the easiest for westerners or people not skilled in a faster way, is to type the romanization, and then to select the proper character from a list of those with the same pronunciation that pops up. There are much faster ways, based on such as the initial stroke of the character, etc.

Answer 4

If you own an American computer and want to type Chinese yourself, it is very easy, even easier than handwriting it. Simply download a program or install your computer. I did it by going to the language setting on mine and installing it. There are tutorials out there.

Basically, you type in pin yin and the computer spits out the characters for you.

As for how they do it in the mainland using actual Chinese computers I'm not sure.

Answer 5

For writing Chinese, they build up the radicals from a keyboard just like yours, using the spacebar to indicate the end of one character and the start of another. I see a young lady do this at work most days, using a normal QWERTY keyboard; but she doesn't look at the keys anyway!

Answer 6

There are specific word processing programs and typing interfaces for Chinese. There's one that I remember seeing where you use Pinyin and it gives you a list of clickable characters. That's probably the fastest one I ever encountered,and it really isn't expensive.

Answer 7

If you want to discover Mandarin but you have no clue where to begin then a program for Mandarin is the best on the internet course for the beginners since it really starts with the basis.

Answer 8

if a person has the english keyboard - they go to control panel then fonts then they'll change the characters to chinese, french, german, etc.

Answer 9

My friend was korean, and she actually had a keyboard with her characters on them! It was really cool.

Answer 10

a tutor?
e-bay?