How do Chinese characters get typed into computers and texts?

Question

well, how on earth do Chinese characters, there being over 1000, get to be typed into computers and textx? We type in each letter onto a board or in a phone, but how can you possibly get that amny characters onto a keyboard? Am I missing something here? Please help

Answer 1

Hi Ridiculousthing, I hate repeated answers, so I'll just post the link from my previous entry, and let you read the contents therein. The user Alex gave a very good answer. I have always felt that he should have gotten the Best Answer because he did it better FIRST. Mine was edited later on when I saw how incomplete my answer was compared to his.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AixWnjA0IEDwh6ZBI9XfDjcjzKIX?qid=20070613194434AA1ZsYu

Answer 2

There are different approaches, some are based on stroke information and others are based on pronounciation.

The most common method used by young people in Mainland China seems to be the pronounciation method based on the "pinyin" method of writing Chinese sounds using an English alphabet (in Taiwan and Hong Kong, pinyin isn't used much). Basically you just type out your sentence as you would pronounce it.

For example...

In Chinese, "Eyes" is 眼睛 and is pronounced "yen jing". What you do is type into the computer "yenjing", and the computer will make a few guesses: when I type "yenjing" the first guess is spot on. However, the same sound in Chinese can correspond to different characters, so if I was actually wanting to type 眼镜 (meaning glasses, but also pronounced "yanjing") or 燕京 (which is an old name for Beijing, but is ALSO pronounced "yanjing"), then I would just press the up arrow on my keyboard to see a list of different guesses that the computer makes for the sounds "yanjing".

In this case, if I wanted to type 眼镜 (meaning glasses), I would type "yanjing", then press the back arrow (to correct the last character), and then press the down arrow to select the characters for the meaning corresponding to "glasses".

The guessing process is quite clever. If I'm typing a sentence about *wearing* "yanjing" (i.e., "daiyanjing"), then it knows that you can't wear Eyes and you can't wear Beijing, so you're probably typing about wearing Glasses... it will pick the right characters automatically after you've typed the sound of the word for "wearing".

Answer 3

They are build up from fundamental radicals and then the space bar (I think) means 'new character'.
I found this in the internet:

A common input method is based on pronunciation. Take, for example, the character representing the word "cat." The word in Mandarin is pronounced "mao" so it can be written in three keystrokes on the English keyboard. When you type in these three letters, a little bar at the bottom of the screen will show you all those characters that have this pronunciation. You pick the one for the word "cat" and the character appears in the right place in your document.

Answer 4

it depends.................
I use pinyin...
this is Latin..............
for example i write "shi" and computer shows me all characters with this pronoutiation....
and this program is very clever because it know where to pu t what characters.....
soemtmies is wrong but is easy to correct
for exapmle
"I learn CHiesne
我学中文
I wrote : woxuezhongwen and space bar...............
if you want to indicate a tone (Chiense is tonal language)
use 123 or 4 on keyboard 1 = first tone etc...
there are other typing methods fro example bopomofo and othe.r...
but I can't use that because I am not native speaker and I prefer write in this way

Answer 5

you can type in pinyin, you have to set it up on your computer by going to the control panel and the regional settings and set it up to type for chinese and type in pinyin. after words you can click on the bottom bar of your computer and select. you can type ni hao and it will turn to 你好 which is hello.