So, if the Chinese don’t have an alphabet and use only pictograms comprising of over 6500 characters, how do they type on a keyboard? Do they have really large keyboards with over 6500 keys or do they just say “Screw Mandarin” and type in English (which can’t be true because I’ve seen Chinese characters on webpages/spam emails)? Is there some kind of algorithmic key pressing magic that goes on in order to produce said characters?
Chinese characters’ pronunciations are expressed using the Latin alphabet with accents for tone (for example tóng xué for 同学, or classmate). Therefore modern Chinese typing is done via normal Latin keyboards by typing the pronunciation (without tones because that’s a pain) and choosing between the keyboard’s different guesses for what you intended to write. For example to say “I want a cake” I’d type “woyaogedangao” and get 我要个蛋糕. This is the Pinyin system, which is used in mainland China among others. Taiwan uses a different system and I don’t know how they type with it.
Source: Am learning Chinese.
How’s learning Chinese going? It’s a beautiful language I’d love to learn someday. I’m trying to learn Esperanto and Spanish. Any advice for someone learning a language?