I have wondered this for years, asked numerous Chinese speakers, but nobody ever seems to know. My burning question is: how do blind Chinese speakers read?
To read braille, they’d have to speak English. At least we have the luzury of an alphabet-based language. But a written language of pictograms? As I understand it, the pictograms are constructed of numerous “radicals”, but there are so many of them that I wonder if one could reasonably be expected to memorize a tactile stimulus for each.
I know my question and understanding of the Chinese language may both be a little muddy, but I think you all catch my drift. So if someone could help me out I’d be much obliged.
I found this here. It suggests what one solution to this might be.
I also remember hearing many years ago about raised characters being used - somewhat like the books for the blind were like before braille - for character based languages like Chinese. Anyone heard of these (or have more time to search than I do at the moment)?
I am not aware of how blind Chinese read, but I suspect strongly they would use Pinyin as HenrySpencer has suggested. As it currently stands, Pinyin is pretty much the world wide standard for romanized Chinese. Mainland Chinese, in fact, learn to pronounce Mandarin (i.e. Pûtônghuà) by learning Pinyin first (Taiwan uses another system for mainly politically reasons). This along means blind Chinese will have no problems with reading since they don’t have to use ideograms/pictograms. Chinese in Taiwan will probably rely on a similar system of Wade-Giles or KK (both methods of romanization). The US Library of Congress, by the way, is transforming all it’s records on Chinese books into Pinyin from Wade-Giles, and so are all the major libraries world wide.
Pinyin Braille would still need a method of showing the intonations on the vowels (level, rising, falling-then-rising, or falling), but that shouldn’t be insurmountable with an extra Braille “letter”. That has to be it.
A Chinese native has told me that Chinese now are able to type with reasonable speed since the invention of the PC. If you’re using a Chinese word-processing package, you type the words in Pinyin (without the intonation marks), and the options for the Putonghua symbols show up along the bottom of the screen. Scroll to the right one, select, and off you go. That method still requires a typist to know Pinyin and be able to touch-type with a Western keyboard, but it works fine - much better than the old-style Chinese typewriters, with 1000 or more keys (talk about the “hunt and peck” system) and still a limited vocabulary.