If there are thousands of chinese characters, how do they text on mobile phones?

Question

If there are thousands of chinese characters, how do these text eachother on mobile phones?

(According to wiki, an educated chinaman would know 7000-8000, and there are about 40 000 in total.)

Answer 1

i think they first type in the pinyin or whatever it's called, and then they choose it from the list of the most commonly used ones.  Even though there are like a billion, only a fraction is commonly used.  fun fun fun fun fun...

Answer 2

all that trouble for the sake of tradition

Answer 3

Texting is big in china. There are a few input methods. Pinyin is very popular (as in spelling out the chinese character and choosing from a selection of words of similar spelling). The other one is Stroke counting (as in knowing how many strokes in a chinese character and then choosing from a list of characters with the same stroke number). There is also predictive texting where commonly used combinations can be called upon with simple input.

Answer 4

Every Chinese word can be represented with letters, called pinyin.  Then all words with this pinyin pop up, with the most common words first, followed by less common ones.  The more you use certain words, the further up on the list it appears.  Also, usually combinations of words are used in Chinese to give it more detailed meaning, and if you write the pinyin of both these words together, you usually only get one result, which is the one you want.

So for instance, if I want to write 姚明, I would first write yao, then find 姚, then write ming, and find 明.  Then I would have 姚明 (Yao Ming).

But if I want to write 中国 (Zhong Guo), I could just write zhongguo and it would give me 中国 as the first result.  Then I would have 中国 (China).

It's really not that much of a hassle compared to English words since each character requires possibly hitting a key multiple times, and Chinese words are very short on average, the most frequent words having 5-6 characters at most.

Answer 5

Chinese type the Chinese Character just as Japanese type the Japanese Character

Answer 6

They do it in english...i mean, there is a way to do it in chinese, but most people won't bother.  Texting isn't as big in China as it is in the US.  Most people in China walk around playing video games.  No one really texts there.