Quote:
Originally Posted by RickyMaveety
And .... looking back over other posts to this thread, the answer is obvious and the question stupid ... but really (?) everyone writes or types rather Chinese characters using the English keyboard?? I give up .... those people are scary smart!
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Keyboards are not innately ENGLISH, but based on the Roman alphabet, which is shared by many languages. In the 20th Century (and in some places much earlier!), many non-Roman languages developed "Romanization" systems that would allow rendering in foreign languages more readily. Japanese have various incarnations of Romaji, and Chinese have various incarnations of Luoma Pinyin. In the former's case, there are also phonetic alphabet systems (katakana and hiragana), and the latter developed a system that wasn't very dissimilar (zhuyin fuhao).
However, remember that keyboards can be mapped to a variety of different modes of input. In English, I sometimes swap between the classic QWERTY arrangement and a more efficient Dvorak layout. The keyboard press is simply an electronic pulse, with its value interpreted by the computer software.
Anyway, the Chinese have a couple other systems that are a bit more formal, involving the components that make each Chinese character (called radicals). Chinese characters generally aren't really pictures...they're just combinations of radicals written with a stroke order. You can take parts of those radicals and map them to a keyboard and "assemble" characters in Chinese input systems without having to even be able to pronounce the word you're typing. That's what is done in Chinese, in a nutshell. Handy since the characters themselves don't present a clear pronunciation, and it would be hard to phonetically type a character you don't know the sound of. Trying to do so would be almost as futile as understanding YouTube video comments.
Not so much a matter of "smart" as it is a natural use of the technology. Cyrillic, Arabic, all sorts of languages have keyboard mappings and software to help input their language with reasonable efficiency.
"Smart" would be managing a way to hack an old 1920s English typewriter to handle thousands of Chinese characters.
