What does a Chinese keyboard look like?
Written by ForeignExchange Translations on Friday, February 19, 2010
Searching the Internet for information on double-byte languages recently, I came across the following question about Chinese keyboards:
"Seriously, do they have letters or symbols? And if symbols, are there a ton of keys?"Intrigued, I searched a bit more and found a general sense of curiosity - but also a lack of real information. When curious minds inquire about Chinese keyboard layouts, "answers" often come in this form:
"They have normal keyboards, sometimes a couple extra buttons"But hidden amongst the dribble, I found four good resources:
- The Explainer at slate.com has a good overview of how people in China type on computers.
- Wikipedia's explanation is short and gets to the point.
- eHow.com provides an alternative description of how Chinese keyboards work.
- Help in typing pinyin with tone marks
Want to give your inner geek some free rein? Check out our posts on the life and times of a typeface, a binary translator for communicating with your CPU and nerdy friends, and the ever-popular periodic table of typefaces.
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Here is the clickable link to the YouTube video for anybody who wants to check it out.
Any sort of stroke-based keyboard (using a system called wu bi) tends to be outdated and only used by stenographers or old people who never learned pinyin. I've heard that you can type a bajillion times faster using strokes, but even so, most computer users these days are actually forgetting how to write characters properly because they're so dependent on pinyin.
Do you think that younger generations of Chinese speakers are more familiar with pinyin than other methods of sorting Chinese? (such as stroke count)?