Last quarter I had two teammates from Taiwan. I was fascinated by their laptops. They had the same WindowsXP, the same black plastic, and the same keyboards... except that all the "text" on their screen was not only Greek to me - it was Chinese! How the heck did they do that?
Looking more closely at their keyboards, one noticed that every key had at least 3 labels on it. It was fascinating and I started to feel a huge gulf between my PC experience and theirs. Without learning Mandarin myself, I doubt that gulf will shrink much but its good to know that it is there.
This article on Slate reminded me of my experience a few months ago.
What Does a Chinese Keyboard Look Like?
How they type in the PRC.
Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2006
Google has launched a self-promoting Chinese-language blog, not long after unveiling its controversial Chinese search engine last month. According to the Washington Post, China already has as many as 16 million bloggers. How do you type Chinese characters on a keyboard?
You use a piece of software called an "input method editor," which allows conventional-looking keyboards to produce the thousands of characters used in written Chinese. There's no standard system, though, so two Chinese keyboards may not look exactly the same and they may not function in the same way.
In the Peoples' Republic of China, most computer users type out their Chinese in transliteration, using the standard Roman alphabet keys on a QWERTY keyboard. To generate a character, you type out its sound according to the same spelling system—called Pinyin—that represents the name of China's capital with the word "Beijing." The computer automatically converts the Pinyin spelling to the correct Chinese characters on the screen.
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