How do the Chinese type?

Question

I just wanted to say, that Great Melon gave a very good answer. I guess, it is very interesting, that the Chinese should type the SOUNDS - means how u pronounce the words, rather that some exact hierogliph.

Thank you very much. I think I will give you the honour of the best answerer :)))

Answer 1

they type their characters by pronunciation or by parts

Answer 2

yes the typewriting is a little more complex but they have typewriters and combinations are possible.

Answer 3

While the written language has many unique characters, spoken Mandarin is based only so many combination of sounds and tones.  In order to type the Chinese have a few different keyboard layouts to input Chinese characters based on the different phonetic systems.  Two of the most prevalent ones I know of are based off of the pinyin or zhuyin phonetic systems.

Both systems can use a qwerty keyboard to write the characters.  If I were to write hello (你好), I would type in ni3 hao3 to get the appropriate tone and sound (there are 4 tones plus 1 neutral tone explaining the number after the sound).

The zhuyin system has its own phonetic alphabet which it assigns to certain keys rather than using roman letters.

Although the characters look really complex, many characters are made of simpler characters known as radicals.  I could use a radical input to "build" a more complex character.

Hope that helps.

Answer 4

I used NanJi Star (years ago) typing "pin yin" but you have to know the actual Chinese character to pick the words from the selection