Mandarin Chinese and using a computer?

Question

As I've been watching the Olympics over the last few days, I've enjoyed watching the segments on the Chinese culture. The other night, they mentioned how writing in the Mandarin language is tens of thousands of symbols to represent each word. My question is how are Mandarin speakers able to type on a computer? A keyboard can only hold so many keys. Is there are special trick to it or something? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

by pronunciation or by character parts

Answer 2

very simple and very fast just as the speaker said above.

I love you=我爱你

Answer 3

I have always wondered this...dont have an answer though sorry!

Answer 4

There are many ways to type the Chinese characters.

more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_inp...

Answer 5

It actually depends on how you learned Chinese. I learned Chinese using Hanyu pinyin, which is basically using the English alphabet to spell out the sounds in Chinese. For instance, if I want to type I LOVE YOU in Chinese, I'd have to type in 'wo' then find the correct Chinese character for I. There's about 30+ words that sound like 'wo', but there are distinctions on how you say it [I'm not going to get into that XD] that makes it a lot easier to find the word you are looking for. As long as you know what character you're looking for, it's easy to type in Chinese (: Just for the record, wo = I; ai = love; ni = you ^__^

My cousins in Taiwan use bopomofo to type in Chinese though. It's sort of like the Chinese phonetic alphabet (:

I hope that wasn't too confusing..^^