No Stupid Questions

So, a half remembered Radiolab episode or maybe it was 99% Invisible talked about this. If I remember rightly they did consider changing it because it was so much quicker and easier typing in English and Chinese character set takes up a lot of storage which was a big deal in early computers. Until someone figured they could break down all the Chinese characters into a much smaller selection of base shapes. So you could make a character by pressing a small selection of keys. So it meant a much more manageable keyboard. I think it's even resulted in quick Chinese typists being faster than English ones.

Pinyin. They also have fancy keyboards with only 9 buttons and predictive text.

I've seen Chinese and Japanese people spell out the sound with an English keyboard and then select the character that they want from a dropdown like menu.

In Korean (and I think some Chinese/Japanese keyboards) you can "build" the character, from building blocks like this

So if I want to use the "character" for "house", I first click the symbol ㅈ then I click ㅣ for 지 then ㅂ for 집 and it puts it together.

I can slightly tweak the shape by tapping the base symbol multiple times (i.e if I have ㅜ and tap ㆍ it makes ㅠ), which can be combined with more symbols like ㅇ and ㄱ to make 육 (the number 6)

There are a handful of methods of input pinyin is taught in China and Zhuyin is taught in Taiwan.

Pinyin is romanized and much easier to learn in my opinion but mashes similar sounds together in a confusing way that isn’t obvious. Zhuyin uses a Chinese derives writing system and is more accurate towards how it’s pronounced but a little more difficult to learn especially for foreigners.

There’s a good podcast episode, maybe overheard at National Geographic on the wubi method and why the creator thinks it’s the best. Essentially pre-pinyin this genius guy came up with another method of input that even today is the fasted way to input Chinese but not as easy to learn as pinyin. Pinyin also carries over some ideological baggage as China wants everyone to learn the same first language at least so the main method of learning and input is pinyin. This is annoying for dialect speakers who have to type pinyin even when the pronunciation is off like Sichuanese or not even the same language like Cantonese.

Personally pinyin is a genius system that makes the language very easy but it can also be too much of a crutch for foreigners.

Now that they type out characters phonetically, a lot of people don't remember Chinese characters any more, even though they can still mostly read them, which is starting to be a new problem over there.

I know we're on "no stupid questions" but this feels dangerously close to a stupid question. If you had just googled "Chinese keyboard" instead of typing this whole post out you would have gotten your answer right away.

They assign ~3 characters per key and press a modifier key like shift to switch between them as needed.