alice

Hi, this is my first time on Chinese Forum

And maybe I have a quite strange question. Today while talking about different languages, my friend said:
"I'm interested in chinese keyboards. Chinese have so many signs."
So, can anybody tell me how the Chinese write on computers with having such the big alphabet..?

And .. hum.. smses for example?

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Yau

The method is quite complicated. In short, all chinese characters can be dismantled into small bits. Simply type in bit by bit, you will get the character.

However, there's more than 100 schemes to dismantle characters. There's no standard yet, but the most popular methods include ChangJie, Wu-Ma (Five-code) and Dayi.

For mobile phone users, it can be much simpler. There's a method named T9 Chinese, it takes 5 keys to input apparently all chinese characters--- seems easy, but the speed is slow (I can type in around 20 characters per min, but 110 characters with Changjie keyboard) .

Another method for mobile phone users is to romanize all characters. for example, The pronounciation of the word "China" is Zhongguo. Just type in "Zhong" and "Guo", the appropriate chinese characters will show up. Again, the drawback is speed.

Lilicat

Ch' voudrais simplement rajouter 2 choses, just want to add up two things :

1. Caractères simplifiés ou traditionels - traitement de texte par phonétiques (soit pinyin soit zhuyin) :
à chaque touche du clavier correspond à un alphabet phonétique (pour le pinyin, parler pékinois, c'est le clavier américan non pas français), même pour les tons (le chinois est une langues à 4 tons, tel ton, tel sens).

2. Caractères chinois traditionels :
d'autres possiblités : mais il faut connaître la compositions des caractères chinois.

P.S. demandes à un chinois qui connaît ces deux systèmes de caractères et de phonétiques pour faire une démonstration (comme moi par exemple =^^=).

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Jonne

well, I type the pinyin (tones as numbers 1, 2 etc).. like
I type ni3 hao3 and it gives me 你好..

pluiepoco

pinyin is latinized Chinese, so it's the easiest for both Chinese natives and foreigners.
For Chinese it self, it has its own pinyin unlatinized, only different is keyboard location of the pronunciation elements.
For Chinese it self, it also has Bushou method, or Cardinals. In which Chinese people dismantle Chinese characters into many visuel elements and each bund of these basic elements is located in one key of the keyboard, then you memorize which key indicates which cardinals, and then you can type these keys in an order how one character forms, they type Enter the Chinese character or word will come out.
The last one is only for Chinese people only, it has many versions for different Chinese-speaking regions.Like Mainland and Taiwan and Hongkong

alice

Thank you all It was unimaginable for me, now I'm probably a little bit closer Fortunatly I don't have this problem but I really wanted to know.
But I think that I have to see it to understand well. So Lillicat, je compte sur ta demonstration dans l'avenir

Thank you once again,

alice

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