So, if the Chinese don’t have an alphabet and use only pictograms comprising of over 6500 characters, how do they type on a keyboard? Do they have really large keyboards with over 6500 keys or do they just say “Screw Mandarin” and type in English (which can’t be true because I’ve seen Chinese characters on webpages/spam emails)? Is there some kind of algorithmic key pressing magic that goes on in order to produce said characters?

  • jagged_circle@feddit.nlEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    BTW this is a hard problems, and its one very effective way the government installs keyloggers on many people

  • Llamatron@lemmy.world
    28·
    2 days ago

    So, a half remembered Radiolab episode or maybe it was 99% Invisible talked about this. If I remember rightly they did consider changing it because it was so much quicker and easier typing in English and Chinese character set takes up a lot of storage which was a big deal in early computers. Until someone figured they could break down all the Chinese characters into a much smaller selection of base shapes. So you could make a character by pressing a small selection of keys. So it meant a much more manageable keyboard. I think it’s even resulted in quick Chinese typists being faster than English ones.

  • Flax@feddit.ukEnglish
    19·
    2 days ago

    Pinyin. They also have fancy keyboards with only 9 buttons and predictive text.

  • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
    17·
    2 days ago

    I’ve seen Chinese and Japanese people spell out the sound with an English keyboard and then select the character that they want from a dropdown like menu.

    In Korean (and I think some Chinese/Japanese keyboards) you can “build” the character, from building blocks like this

    My keyboard

    So if I want to use the “character” for “house”, I first click the symbol ㅈ then I click ㅣ for 지 then ㅂ for 집 and it puts it together.

    I can slightly tweak the shape by tapping the base symbol multiple times (i.e if I have ㅜ and tap ㆍ it makes ㅠ), which can be combined with more symbols like ㅇ and ㄱ to make 육 (the number 6)

    • pycorax@lemmy.world
      8·
      2 days ago

      Japanese is kind of similar. Although usually native speakers do not use an English keyboard. They use this:

      Since Japanese has 5 vowels, each key here represents a consonant and can actually enter any of the 5 vowels by either tapping on it or flicking up, down, left or right on it. Once you’ve built the word you’re trying to write, you can tap on the auto suggested kanji or katakana or leave it as is in hiragana.

      The exception is the bottom left and right keys which are for alternative consonants (I’m not sure the actual linguistic term) and punctuation which have fewer options but work similarly.

      So if I’m writing the character for home, I’d flick the button toy he right of the emoji button left for い and then right for え. Once I have both hiragana characters, I just need to tap on the 家 character that appears above the keyboard.

    • teft@lemmy.world
      5·
      2 days ago

      Hangul doesnt work the same way since each character is a letter. The blocks are syllables and are automatic using rules.

    • otp@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      2 days ago

      In Korean (and I think some Chinese/Japanese keyboards) you can “build” the character, from building blocks like this

      I’d say you’re not building the character, but typing in the characters one by one.

      집, as you know from typing it, is three characters in one. All three components are distinct. They can’t stand alone, but that’s not much different than “c” not really being able to stand alone in English. (If we refer to the letter C, we often capitalize it)

      In Japanese, people can easily type in Hiragana (their “alphabet”), and the Kanji can be suggested like with autocorrect. The sound is the same, but the visual is different.

      Chinese is a different beast because they don’t have an “alphabet” of “letters” the ways that Korean and Japanese do.

      (They’re not “alphabets”, but they do have elements that are much closer to letters than Chinese does)

      • Mac@mander.xyzEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        T9

        I was using a keyboard for it for a while a couple months ago but when back to a keyboard due to missing features.

  • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    Now that they type out characters phonetically, a lot of people don’t remember Chinese characters any more, even though they can still mostly read them, which is starting to be a new problem over there.

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
      11·
      2 days ago

      There is over 20k characters and most people know or use like 2 or 3k of them. Educated Chinese know like 6k on average. And it seems every decade the number goes down.

      Curious what it’s evolving into.

  • ShinkanTrain@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    I assume the same way I type in Japanese: regular qwerty keyboard and phonetically. Space key lets you change between characters