# Typing in Chinese using a cell phone?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/typing-in-chinese-using-a-cell-phone/411393>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [July 11, 2007, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/typing-in-chinese-using-a-cell-phone/411393 "2007-07-11T17:28:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![The\_Controvert](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/dec6dc/32.png) [@The\_Controvert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Controvert)\
**Post date:** [July 11, 2007, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/typing-in-chinese-using-a-cell-phone/411393/1 "2007-07-11T17:28:42Z")

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Entering English text is not too bad with just a cell phone’s number pad. But is this possible with Chinese? How many button presses on average to key in a Chinese character?

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**Author:** ![WonJohnSoup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f17d59/32.png) [@WonJohnSoup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WonJohnSoup)\
**Post date:** [July 12, 2007, 12:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/typing-in-chinese-using-a-cell-phone/411393/2 "2007-07-12T00:00:57Z")

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Average number of button presses I don’t know. But Chinese phones will often have a stroke system. Button 1 being a vertical stroke, etc. The way Chinese is written is that each word has the strokes done in a certain order, so the stroke system works pretty well. Another has a “radical” system, though I think I only saw that once. I most often used the pinyin entry system which uses Latin characters to spell out a Chinese word, even though my phone was also equipped with the stroke system. The software in the phone would quickly pop up a character it predicts you’re about to spell out. The others also had a predictive system just like T9.

All of them are pretty darn fast. I would personally say the average text-messeger in China would toast your average text-messeger in America, if not just because of more practice. Just my personal experience.

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**Author:** ![China\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/779978/32.png) [@China\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/China_Guy)\
**Post date:** [July 12, 2007, 5:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/typing-in-chinese-using-a-cell-phone/411393/3 "2007-07-12T05:33:30Z")

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to add onto WonJohn Soup, when you type in the romanization, you get a list of corresponding characters to choose from. Kinda like autocomplete. It works reasonably well.