How does a Chinese keyboard

How many characters in the Chinese language do not presume to count even the people of China. Unlike many countries in the world China has no unified alphabet. and therefore each province not only speak their own dialect. but use their own characters. Agree, it is difficult with this approach, imagine a computer keyboard ...

For many years China could not sell the printed writing precisely because of the abundance of characters. The idea of a compact input Chinese characters, decomposed into its component parts suggested by the scholar Lin Yitan from China in the middle of the last century. The characters in the different language of the same lines, which are called graphemes. All of these graphemes in the language of China has 250 pieces, and it is said that they, though with difficulty, but can fit on a standard keyboard.

To minimize the keys on the keyboard, it was decided to supply every two or three functions, such as, for example, Russian or American, and eight, i.e. key keyboard contains the approximately eight graphemes.

Typing catastrophically difficult: the Chinese uses two method of printing characters is the phonetic input and the graphic input.

Graphical input

For printing by the second method the Chinese use a standard keyboard, combining graphemes to make the characters, thus in order to enter, sometimes you have up to 7 times to switch registers.

However, the keyboard more usovershenstvuetsya. So, the Chinese have noticed that in language, there are 24 of the most frequently used character. Accordingly, their input can be done with a push of a button. Clicking on the same button two or three times on the other a little less frequently occurring characters.

Phonetic input

As for the phonetic input method, it differs no less in complexity from the previous method. When you enter a character appears, not the symbol, and visual analogue transcription - pronunciation - intelligent system tries to give the user the correct character. This method is similar to the famous T9. But the Chinese language contains a large number of characters that are similar in phonetic pronunciation. So the character has to find their own.

On both types of keyboards retain the familiar to Europeans Shift, Enter and other, but functional keyboard shortcuts the top row (F1, F2, etc) abolished in favor of the shift registers and input the standardized graphemes.

Digital multifunctional field. If European "clave" is the only support options like Home, PgDn, Chinese these keys have three characters, a special character and one number.