28 Keys and 8000 characters - Language II

If the Chinese have so many different characters, how do they manage to write on a (what we call) conventional keyboard with just a little more than 26 keys? That's a question I have often been asked. Here is a short answer to it:

Since 1958 the Chinese adopted a "transcription" of their language into the Roman alphabet, which is called "pin yin" 拼音. This allows to phonetically describe the pronunciation of every of the few thousands characters. Sometimes intonation marks help to distinguish the various sounds. However, as explained in the last post, just knowing the pronunciation still doesn't unambiguously tell you, which word or meaning is actually meant. That's when the numerous characters come into the game...   

So how does this work on computers? First of all you have to choose a Chinese language mode in your preferences. Then you can try it out yourself...

One writing method (I think the most popular one) consists in writing the word in pinyin as we would do it, e.g. "yin", and then choosing from one of the many possible characters with this pronunciation, prompted by the computer. In the case of e.g. "yin" it would be 音， 因， 引， 印, 银， 饮， 阴， 隐， 垠， 吟， 堙，夤 or 尹 and just a few others to choose from by curser or by typing the corresponding number. 

A second method, which apparently is more used by writing professionals (secretaries etc) is called "wu bi" 五笔. There you somehow construct your character as you would write it manually. Each character in Chinese is written in a defined sequence of strokes (vertical, horizontal, downwards to the left, to the right etc) and consists of a "root" and a "sound" part and so on. 

Each key on the keyboard is attributed one of these strokes or simple roots. For example, typing the letter "j" writes the "root" 日, which you can see in the lower part of the character "yin".

A third method which is gaining much in popularity is the writing recognition. People write by hand on a screen and the computer recognizes the character. That program actually must be quite powerful. If you have ever seen hand written Chinese, you know what I mean. But on the other hand it's harder for the user, as you still have to be able to actively compose a character. Many Chinese say that they are loosing their ability to write, as they are mostly using the first method, where you only have to recognize a character and not write it yourself. However, they all pretend that writing Chinese on a computer can be as fast as any other language. I haven't yet really had the chance to confirm this.

500 g of mandarines = 1 RMB