Stumped. How do they work as there is no alphabet?
My friend who often texts his Chinese girlfriend writes the words with Latin characters (phonetically, presumably) and the phone transforms these words into Chinese signs , so I think that is how it’s generally done, but I guess there might be other solutions as well.
What about texting? Imagine the size of their cell phones!
Actually, I was just in China and saw folks texting. It appears to me that they text using Pinyin on a normal, Roman-alphabet keyboard, then select the symbol they want from the little Autocomplete list. It’s a pretty quick process.
i’m talking about the average computer user in China
Don’t know how it works in Chinese, but you can see an example of how it works in Japanese in the movie Battle Royale. It does seem to work with a kind of autocorrect scheme : the guy types a number of characters, and each press of the keyboard not only adds a new kanji to the word he’s typing but modifies every other character that came before to make a whole new word. Very much like texting, and presumably based on phonetics rather than “spelling”.
Or you could hit Wikipedia, because it knows everything :).
I use a Chinese smartphone I purchased while living in China. It’s no bigger or smaller than any other phone (except of course those “phablets”). There are a few different input methods to type/text in Chinese, just like there are for computers in Chinese. You have Pinyin, Bopomofo, strokes. It’s really not that big of an issue.