guuh...cant get this out of my head:P

[Hinders]

I have been thinking of this the whole day....
gaahhh...
anyway here is teh question:

How the fuck does a chinese keyboard work???
there are like 10 000 characters

plz tell me, someone, so i can get it out of my head

[Domino]

I don't know either, but maybe its the size of a dining room table. Requiring 5 people to lift and hold on their laps.

But seriously, i'm interested to know myself.

BG

[Gregjazz]

A Chinese keyboard, in fact, looks just like an 'English' keyboard. They type how the word sounds (Pin Yin) and a little list of the different characters comes up -- with a number associated with each character. Then they press a number to select the character. You can actually type pretty fast this way, believe it or not.

Feel better now?

[Shattered Sponge]

Weird.  I remember spyros asking the exact same question back on ezboard.

OK, so that's not even remotely weird, but still at least an interesting coincidence.

[Evil]

And whats the deal with alt-codes on the macs? I mean I wish I could do it the way they do with the shift and the other things...

[remixor]

How do Aramaic keyboards work?  I've been wondering and wondering and I just can't figure it out.

[Hinders]

thanks geoff
now i can get this out of my head

[Nine Toes]

Crazy...

I've been wondering the same thing about japanese keyboards for a long time.  Because the japanese alphabet is divided into three sections (katakana, hiragana, and I can't remember the name of the third type), and each of these sections include about 200+ characters.

I've just never cared enough to research it or ask if anyone knew anything.

[ThunderStorm]

Why not do a google picture search?
This is what I found:

[Gilbert]

Heh why don't you ask me?

But for Japanese keyboards, I think they just assign ~50 keys for their alphabet characters.

Note that katakana and hirakana are just the SAME set of alphabets, used in different circumstances sometimes (but this is not imposed as a rule), like for English you have CATIPAL and lower case alphabets, they're the same set of alphabets, just written differently.

So they just use some "conversion keys" just like shift and capslock to swidth between English alphabets and their 2 sets of characters input. For Kanji input, they just need to input their pronounciations in phases using their alphabets.

Of course, you can also use English alphabets to input them by using the "roman" conversion.

[Gregjazz]

Why not do a google picture search?
This is what I found:

That's the chinese CNPA transliteration. It consists of "initials" and "finals", so you can spell chinese words with simple characters representing sounds. You do not use these in every-day writing -- in fact you only really use them to help you with Pin Yin.

I memorized the CNPA transliteration characters a while back, but I never had any need for them because I already know Pin Yin spelling. In my opinion, a keyboard like that would just be slower.

[Gilbert]

Actually that's a standard Chinese KB with Pinyin, Chajei and Daiyi, etc. symbols. Note that Pinyin is only popular in places that people are fluent in Mandarin (and to use their vocal symbols), so it's rarely used in many places of teh world. It only depends on whether a person is familiar with which type of input method, for example, I never used Pinyin, and would use Chajei instead, others may choose differently.

Not to mention other methods just as "writting" teblets, etc.

[Hinders]

That keyboard looks complicated@_@

[bspeers100]

Not as complicated as my feelings for you, Hindersch.

Not as deeply, deeply complicated.

[Gilbert]

It's not complicated at all, if you're familiar for one type of input method, you only need to look at one set of symbols on it. Moreover, the keyboard is EXACTLY the same to a standard US keyboard, just more symbols were printed on it, experienced users won't need the symbols anyways and can type without their aid with a normal US keyboiard (like me).