since there are thousands of characters in their written languages?
With fucking huge keyboards.
Some have touchscreens upon which the characters can be drawn. Others use a standard english layout and one types the phonetic pronunciation which is converted into the correct character. Others use a system of root shapes that can be combined in various ways to form the characters.
At least some use keyboards that can type more than one character per key.
This is how Mrs. Greenjeans enters Japanese text into a computer or her phone.
This is also how my Chinese speaking friend and his Chinese wife text with phone etc.
As you type in pinyin on a Chinese copy of Windows, it pops up below with characters you can select. When you get the one you mean, you pick it.
Others have told me they have keyboards that make the strokes in Chinese and they type that way.
A lot of them use a keyboard just like yours because they’re perfectly capable of reading and writing in English. In Japan they have a writing style where a limited number of characters are used to represent distinct sounds (I won’t try to name it since I never get it right).
The Master spoke in 1995.
And since then, we’ver already seen that Mr. Greenjeans and Wakinyan have a better solution to the problem.
Oh Dear Master, where art thou when we most needest you? Speak to us again, I beseech thee!
the pinyin method is actually quite simple. it’s like the auto-suggestion on your phone, and if you type two related characters before choosing, it’s more accurate than the auto-suggestions for English.
It’s exactly the same solution mentioned by Cecil (for Chinese): you type in the pinyin and you get a list of suggestions. I’m not sure what difference you’re seeing.
No, the method they are describing is the 3rd one listed in The Master’s article. Except the efficiency and accuracy have improved significantly. Back then, you typically had to enter and convert one “word” at a time. Nowadays you can enter much longer phrases, and the conversion program (input method editor) uses context and user history to predict the correct characters.
There are two: Hiragana, and Katakana. Foreign words are almost always spelled in Katakana characters. Traditionally, Hiragana was for girls, despite its utter lack of little hearts or unicorns.
And here I was expecting the answer to be “With TCP/IP.”
Seems to me that if they licked the problem of making Chinese typewriters way back when they would have very little difficulty with the Internet.
There is no third method listed in the article.
It’s all one method, which is exactly what Inner Stickler, Mr Greengenes, and Wakinyan describe, except drawn out in excruciating step by step detail - including steps one and two being the sort of thing most people who need to write in Chinese would do instinctively and not consider part of ‘typing’, any more than an English person would consider figuring out which word they want to use and its spelling to be so - to make it look harder than it is.
Who says they have any difficulty with it now??
to expand a bit:
kanji (complicated Chinese symbols, thousands of 'em): most native words, nouns/verb roots/adjectives/etc
hiragana (curvy phonetic symbols, one per sound, not many): conjugation/grammar/particles/suffixes/etc, and certain words that don’t have kanji or just aren’t written with kanji
katakana (more angular-looking, phonetic, all the sounds hiragana has plus a few extra like “fa” “fi” “di” etc): foreign words/loanwords, plus any situation where you’d use bold/italic in English… too many to list
Kanji is generally typed using the same phonetic/predictive-text type of system used for Chinese.
You’re right, of course, I only glanced at the article and misunderstood.