What do chinese keybords look like?
Asked by
kapuerajam (
920
)
June 16th, 2008
from iPhone
because don’t they have like 20000 caracters
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8 Answers
Nowadays they type in Pinyin. Pinyin is a way of writing the characters out based on pronunciation. Instead of typing ”嗨” (hello) you type Ni-Hao (the way to pronounce it) and the character is then selected from several possible characters.
Traditional Chinese and Taiwanese typewriters and keyboards, however, were HUGE and had multiple shift keys so that each key could be several characters.
it’s not a lot bigger then hours, they used to have a few extra modifier keys, so like 3/4 characters on each key, now they just compose characters out of multiple keys, here’s an example of a modern one
ah, someone beat me to it
No problem
and @iwamoto
You supplemented my answer with a picture! So it was a team effort…
They have slanted i’s. (as in italicized)
I actually use a penpower tablet to input/write in the characters. It’s a bit slower than writing but then I don’t have to pick the characters from the list. (Chinese has an obscene number of homonyms, as all characters are essentially monosyllabic).
http://www.taiwan.com.au/Soccul/Language/Features/style01.jpg
And we don’t have slanted “i“s… actually, it’s just that we put a short line in mandarin pinyin over the main vowel of the word to indicate what tone it is (there are four: a flat line, a rising line, a squiggle ‘u’, and a line slanting down)
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