I have heard that, in order to understand Chinese, you must learn at least 3,000 characters. How big of a keyboard would that be?Our keyboard is about a foot long, and we have 26 letters, so a Chinese keyboard must be about 115 feet long!But seriously, how DO they type Chinese?????
You could type Chinese on your keyboard if you wish to. Chinese keyboards are exactly the same size as ours. There are various methods of typing Chinese. You can type by entering pinyin, or you can type phonetically (Chinese is made up from monosyllables) - there are various methods of typing. Only difference is that Chinese keyboards may have small characters next to each letter.
You could type Chinese on your keyboard if you wish to. Chinese keyboards are exactly the same size as ours. There are various methods of typing Chinese. You can type by entering pinyin, or you can type phonetically (Chinese is made up from monosyllables) - there are various methods of typing. Only difference is that Chinese keyboards may have small characters next to each letter. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This exactly true, and as a side note, there are some characters (symbols) that are not available and have to be accessed via alt functions. There is also the Wubi method which allows you to select characters based on the radicals you type in which are on the keys of the keyboard and are accessed via ckicking alts, shifts, etc.
A chinese keyboard is like a wall with many many drawers each one having a 102 letter keyboard. there is one key for every glyph at the unicode.
I have a Taiwanese colleague at work and she types happily in Chinese characters using a normal keyboard. She builds the individual characters from their radicals using the Tab key, I think, and the result is perfect Chinese.
We type by using the same keyboard as you do, the QWERTY keyboard if that's what you're using. First you'd have to go to control panel and set the langauge Chinese and I use Quick, so it's like Chinese (Taiwan) Then chose the method of typing in the characters. Then of course the system. We have one part of a character assigned to each key in the alphabet. Each key would perhaps stand for more than one part. If you're using Quick, the you'll be entering the first and last bit of the character, usually you would know that by writing the order of the strokes in a character, but that's not every case. Then you would see a list of characters and just chose the one you need. That it! Hope this helped you to understand how to type Chinese. Oh, I'll throw in an example, like the word I or me, it starts with a this stroke going down and end with a slight dot. Then I would key in the letter that represents these two parts, in this case, it would be h and then i. Then I would look down the list, and this word is the seventh word, then I'd press 7 to get the word. It doesn't show you the whole list at once, if you can't find it on the first page, every page consists of 9 characters unless it's the last page. Then you press the spacebar to continue. Of course, you can use the mouse.
