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Pinyin. They also have fancy keyboards with only 9 buttons and predictive text.
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Submitted 5 months ago by mortimer@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 5 months ago
neatobuilds@lemmy.today 5 months ago
Is it like a stenotype?
OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
I’ve seen Chinese and Japanese people spell out the sound with an English keyboard and then select the character that they want from a dropdown like menu.
In Korean (and I think some Chinese/Japanese keyboards) you can “build” the character, from building blocks like this
So if I want to use the “character” for “house”, I first go ㅈ then 지 then 집 and it puts it together
pycorax@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Japanese is kind of similar. Although usually native speakers do not use an English keyboard. They use this:
Since Japanese has 5 vowels, each key here represents a consonant and can actually enter any of the 5 vowels by either tapping on it or flicking up, down, left or right on it. Once you’ve built the word you’re trying to write, you can tap on the auto suggested kanji or katakana or leave it as is in hiragana.
The exception is the bottom left and right keys which are for alternative consonants (I’m not sure the actual linguistic term) and punctuation which have fewer options but work similarly.
So if I’m writing the character for home, I’d flick the button toy he right of the emoji button left for い and then right for え. Once I have both hiragana characters, I just need to tap on the 家 character that appears above the keyboard.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 5 months ago
Reminds me of whatever this is
Mac@mander.xyz 5 months ago
T9
teft@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Hangul doesnt work the same way since each character is a letter. The blocks are syllables and are automatic using rules.
otp@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
In Korean (and I think some Chinese/Japanese keyboards) you can “build” the character, from building blocks like this
I’d say you’re not building the character, but typing in the characters one by one.
집, as you know from typing it, is three characters in one. All three components are distinct. They can’t stand alone, but that’s not much different than “c” not really being able to stand alone in English. (If we refer to the letter C, we often capitalize it)
In Japanese, people can easily type in Hiragana (their “alphabet”), and the Kanji can be suggested like with autocorrect. The sound is the same, but the visual is different.
Chinese is a different beast because they don’t have an “alphabet” of “letters” the ways that Korean and Japanese do.
(They’re not “alphabets”, but they do have elements that are much closer to letters than Chinese does)
ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 5 months ago
There are a handful of methods of input pinyin is taught in China and Zhuyin is taught in Taiwan.
Pinyin is romanized and much easier to learn in my opinion but mashes similar sounds together in a confusing way that isn’t obvious. Zhuyin uses a Chinese derives writing system and is more accurate towards how it’s pronounced but a little more difficult to learn especially for foreigners.
There’s a good podcast episode, maybe overheard at National Geographic on the wubi method and why the creator thinks it’s the best. Essentially pre-pinyin this genius guy came up with another method of input that even today is the fasted way to input Chinese but not as easy to learn as pinyin. Pinyin also carries over some ideological baggage as China wants everyone to learn the same first language at least so the main method of learning and input is pinyin. This is annoying for dialect speakers who have to type pinyin even when the pronunciation is off like Sichuanese or not even the same language like Cantonese.
Successful_Try543@feddit.org 5 months ago
Isn’t Pinyin a romanisation method, i.e. writing chinese using the Latin alphabet instead of Chinese glyphs?
IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Sample Text:
同志们
这个外国人连一点中文的知识都没有
真是笨蛋
Video of me typing it: i.imgur.com/uPKBdJh.mp4
The text is a joke btw, don’t take it too seriously.
SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
点
This has to be a shower head, right? I bet the sentance is about cleaning oneself
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 5 months ago
The fact that I can understand a good part of that scares
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Now that they type out characters phonetically, a lot of people don’t remember Chinese characters any more, even though they can still mostly read them, which is starting to be a new problem over there.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
There is over 20k characters and most people know or use like 2 or 3k of them. Educated Chinese know like 6k on average. And it seems every decade the number goes down.
Curious what it’s evolving into.
Majorllama@lemmy.world 5 months ago
[deleted]mortimer@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I don’t use Google. I deGoogled my life. Besides, if we just used Google for everything there would be no point communicating at all and thus no point in Lemmy. We could all just ask the Master Google questions, chat with it’s AI and stay locked in our bedrooms eating pizza sponsored by Google.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 5 months ago
We also get to discuss it as well
ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 5 months ago
Which method are you talking about lol
Majorllama@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Method? Idk my roommate for like 6 years was Chinese and he had a keyboard that he could switch between American English and Chinese. He showed me how it worked and the key caps all had a few Chinese symbols next to each English letter and he could cycle between them as needed. He wasn’t as fast typing in Chinese, but it was the only way for him to communicate with certain family as they couldn’t speak or read English at all.
When his mom visited her laptop also had a similar set up except on hers the English letters were smaller and the. Chinese symbols were bigger. I assume because she bought it in China or something.
jagged_circle@feddit.nl 5 months ago
BTW this is a hard problems, and its one very effective way the government installs keyloggers on many people
ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
I assume the same way I type in Japanese: regular qwerty keyboard and phonetically. Space key lets you change between characters
llamatron@lemmy.world 5 months ago
So, a half remembered Radiolab episode or maybe it was 99% Invisible talked about this. If I remember rightly they did consider changing it because it was so much quicker and easier typing in English which matters in the digital age. Until someone figured they could break down all the Chinese characters into a much smaller selection of base shapes. So you could make a character by pressing a small selection of keys. So it meant a much more manageable keyboard. I think it’s even resulted in the fastest Chinese typist being faster than English.
ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 5 months ago
Maybe that’s what I was thinking of. The title is Wubi but I couldn’t remember the show.