Ugh. I've been dreading writing this post for quite awhile, because it's rather impossible to explain in writing, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. Here goes!
I believe last year I had a picture of my computer. In that picture you may have noticed that each key of the keyboard had the usual letter, but also three other symbols on them as well. These are for the various, albeit ridiculous ways to type Chinese.
I shall now attempt to explain how to type Chinese. There is no way I can succinctly do this, but since i don't want to write for forever about it, i will try my best. For those truly curious, it would probably be easiest just to look it up in google, as a video, or a page that explains it with multiple pictures would be much better.
Regardless, here I go....
First I need to say that chinese has a few "problems" when it comes to typing. The first is that it's a tone language, meaning your tone of voice when saying a word is important to it's meaning. In particular Mandarin has 5 tones. Flat tone, rising tone, falling then rising, falling tone, and finally like a quick emphasis tone (the last one is only used in special situations, usually at the end of a certain sentences).
So Chinese can have a word that sounds the same, and is written the same, but with a different tone, it has a different meaning. For example the character above means "good" if you use the third tone, but it means "fond of..." if you use the fourth tone. Not a big difference, but with some words the different is great and could lead to some very terrible misunderstandings.
A bigger "problem" with Chinese that it's basically drawing pictures, so there is no easy way to type this. So most input methods involve typing out the pronunciation of a word, however as we learned above, because of tones, there are hundreds if not thousands of words which are pronounced the exact same way, but are written differently. For example the pronunciation of the word above is "hao" (sounds like "how"), but that same pronunciation is used for "number" and for "to waste" as well as many other words.
So how do we get the exact word we want? Well after typing in the pronunciation, then a tiny screen will come up that has the four most common Chinese characters that are pronounced that way. You then have to scroll through the list to find the word you want, click on it, then start typing the next word.
Are you beginning to see why typing Chinese is such a chore? Granted computers and phones naturally will just input the words that it thinks you want, sometimes even going back and changing the words at the beginning of the sentence as you type more and it realizes that you meant something different. But still a large amount of your time is scrolling through a popup menu to find the word you want, or going back in the sentence and changing a word or two since the computer guessed wrong. You can kind of see this in the picture above, where i drew the character and then it is giving me some choices of what it thinks I was trying to write, and i can press the grey button on the white button on the left to have it show me four more options. Granted this is a bit different cause in this way it's trying to decipher what I drew rather than guess from writing out the pronunciation, but it's pretty much the same thing if I had written "hao" it would have come up with a window of characters to choose from.
Clear so far? Well tomorrow I will get into the more common methods of actually inputting Chinese. I'll also refer back to today's picture, so please burn this image into your mind. Oh and in case you are curious, the word in the background of this picture is the Chinese way to write "Chinese" the language, not the people.
