Today, I'm going to write about typing Chinese on the computer. Yes, you've read it right - Chinese, not Japanese. I've learned about this from Chung, a researcher from Taiwan, and I think it's kind of interesting. As you might know, Chinese has many thousand characters, so unlike Thai or English, putting all of them on the keyboard is very impractical.
Chinese Input Methods can be divided into 2 groups - phonetic-based and shape-based. I was told that most Taiwanese uses the phonetic system since it's easier to use, as you just type the sound using the English keyboard. However, since many characters can have the same sound, the user needs to choose between different characters slowing them down.
For example, wo = 我, shi = 是
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| Disambiguation system in Mac OSX |
The other system, shape-based, decomposes a Chinese characters into small shapes which can be encoded into the English alphabet. This allows for precise input of Chinese characters without having to choose between different characters, and thus, is faster. There are many different systems such as
Cangjie,
Dayi,
Boshiamy. Some implementation of shape-based input methods are not pre-installed and has to be purchased separately by the user.
For example, to type 是 mentioned above, you must break it down into 日 (the top part) and 足 (the full form of the bottom part). So you type "d9" on your keyboard then press space bar to get 是.
Interesting, isn't it? There's actually a third input method which is drawing the actual character and the computer will recognize it, but it's very inefficient and isn't really a keyboard-based input method.
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