How do chinese keyboards work

Once you have chosen your preferred Chinese keyboard, you can now type in Chinese. If you already know how to pronounce Chinese characters with using pinyin , just simply type the pinyin of the characters you want, and ignore the four tones in Chinese at the moment. When you are typing, several Chinese characters will appear in a small window, you can choose the one you want and type the number of it. Then the character that you want will be typed out.

If the number is 1, you can just press space bar instead. If you are using a cellphone , you can just press on the Chinese character, no need to press any numbers or space bar. If you are using a cell phone , similarly, you can press the arrow beside the row of the Chinese characters to look for more characters as shown in Figure 9 ; you can also press the arrow again to go back.

In Figure 10, the quotation marks will automatically appear when you are typing, which is to separate the pinyin for each Chinese character. In addition, to speed up more, you can type the first letter of pinyin for each Chinese character in a phrase, then the most common Chinese phrases related to this pinyin will come out. Other groups of fuzzy pinyin are shown in Figure Hence, to type in Chinese more efficiently, you may want to turn on the function of fuzzy pinyin in the settings of input methods or keyboard as shown in Figure With maayot , receive a daily engaging story in Mandarin Chinese based on your level.

How does it work? The final method is a little more niche, as it is almost used entirely by people of Taiwan and Taiwan alone.

The Zhuyin keyboard uses ancient Chinese letters and symbols instead of our Qwerty keys. Those symbols can be combined to create a unique type of alphabet. It is based on phonetic Mandarin, meaning you are typing the sounds rather than the correct spelling. This form of keyboard is by far the least efficient and hardest to use.

But, you would pretty much only use this if you lived in Taiwan. Not all Taiwanese people use the Zhuyin keyboard, most would use either the Pinyin or the Wubi. But there is a significant portion that does. So it does deserve a mention. Hopefully, China will eventually create some comparatively good keyboards for their population to use.

But, it seems unlikely. China is always behind in innovation, especially in this area. For a few reasons. All the initial work into keyboards was done for English speaking people. Furthermore, they have an incredibly difficult task of condensing their language down into a usable format. They would need minuscule keys on the keyboard to fit even a fraction of the quantity needed.

Lastly, China struggles with innovation. Their laws around copyright are basically non-existent. So, the majority of Chinese products are just rip-offs of other countries. Which is neither here nor there. Why this is so problematic for keyboards, is that no other country has anything to gain by creating a Chinese keyboard.

Who would they sell it to? Not china, because they can just legally copy it. So there is nothing pushing anyone to innovate in this area. So, hopefully, this has answered any questions you may have had about how Chinese keyboards work. It cannot be overstated how difficult it is to innovate in this area.

As touch screen technology improves so will customizability, eventually, they may invent some kind of keyboard that holds up to the efficiency and speed of our own. Wireless computer mice can be extremely expensive nowadays if they are super good and loaded with excellent features. If we talk about gaming mice in the industry right now, either they are not very high-quality or they are super-duper expensive. So, to really have a great experience, we need to find gaming Skip to content When looking at all the different types of keyboards that exist, it is interesting to look at the most extreme opposites of our standard Qwerty keyboard.

There's no standard method for this, however. Two Chinese different keyboards will probably look and function differently. It's up to each user to tweak the settings. The computer automatically replaces the completed word with the corresponding symbol or symbols. It's a little more complicated than that, though -- plenty of Chinese words sound similar but are written completely differently.

A common workaround is to type a number after a syllable to indicate which variation is intended. Advanced Pinyin input software will make guesses on specific characters based the context of your writing. Some will also let you assign shortcuts for certain words -- an English equivalent would be to set "r-b-t" to automatically write the word "robot. It's called Wubi. You type a sequence of keys, not corresponding to the sound of the word, but to the shape of the character. The keyboard is divided into regions associated with the strokes in each character -- you "type" the character by punching the keys corresponding to what each part of the character looks like.

People who want to write characters by hand can use an electronic tablet. Because each character's strokes are very precise and distinct, the Chinese written language can be interpreted by a device relatively easily.

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