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?
Pinyin. They also have fancy keyboards with only 9 buttons and predictive text.
llamatron@lemmy.world 6 days 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 6 days ago
Maybe that’s what I was thinking of. The title is Wubi but I couldn’t remember the show.