Chinese has no alphabet. Every word is its own symbol, though there are many compound words. There are about 50 000 different characters with 215 basic root words. That simply will not fit on any reasonable keyboard. Typing in Chinese requires using the key which is most likely to have the word you want and scrolling down until you find what you are looking for. It is time consuming and easy to see why government agencies use pen and paper.
“Parks and other public spaces are full of mostly red lanterns” took me probably four seconds to type. “公園與大眾場所也會掛滿著紅色的燈籠” took over four seconds per word.
我会买明天新的厨房毛巾。
4 comments:
That is really interesting about typing Chinese. Never really thought about it. Since Japanese DOES have a syllabary, it isn't too difficult to type with on a standard computer. You have a few input options, including one key = one syllable but the one I usually use is one that has you type in roman characters that will then output Japanese. It lets me keep my home row touch typing skills intact rather than have to hunt for new key positions. Also, when putting in the actual characters, it will auto select based on what else you have written, and usually that is correct. Though if it isn't you can fairly quickly search through a list of homonyms, which are quite common in Japanese.
Since Chinese is a tonal language there's really no way to do homonyms on a keyboard. 馬
嬷, 閁, 螞 can all be spelled "ma" but don't sound alike. I've never seen anybody type by touch in Chinese. They're always looking down at the keyboard searching for one of the thousands of words on just a few keys.
you should purchase a new computer every 5 years.
That's never going to happen.
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