Typing in china/japan

[edc 0]

Does anyone know how they type in China and Japan. Because don't they have like thousands of characters?

[ralphwiggum 6]

you just typed it!

C-H-I-N-A, J-A-P-A-N !

seriously, though.

I'm no expert, but here's how it goes. there are several ways to acheive for both languages. one way which is used by many Chinese Americans and Japanses Americans is using romanized pronounciation to look for characters. for example, if you are going to type a Chinese word like...."zaizien", you'd probably type "zai" and computer will display some Chinese characters corresponding to it. then after choosing correct one, you type "Zien" and so on.

another way would be (AFAIK) that chinese characters are also divisiable between distinctive strokes(for dummies, 'lines' and each stroke would correspond to each keyboard alphabet on english keyboard. as you type, the strokes will addup.

similar thing for Japanese i guess.

if you have win 2000, you can set multiple languages and try to type it out. there are about 4 different ways to type chinese and 2 for japanese, AFAIK.

[Benze 0]

I believe I heard you can combine characters to get different ones...so you could maybe hold down "q" and "f" and "z" at the same time and get a different one? Not really sure. Or you could just learn a non ideographical language.

[Mister Frag 0]

Windows handles many non-Western languages using an IME, or Input Method Editor. It's a popup window that can be used to enter text by converting one or more keystrokes into a single character in the selected local codepage and character set.

Depending on the version Windows, the characters are processed as Shift-JIS, multi-byte, or double-byte characters. Windows 95/98/ME use Shift-JIS or multi-byte characters, while Windows NT/2000/XP natively use the double-byte UNICODE system.

[Albert Schweitzer 10]

Also, dont forget that many symbols all stand for the same thing. The chinese are not smarter than us and they too have a very limited amount of characters they use (even if the language itself provides a lot). So I think for writing an average letter a keyboard with Alt, shift and ctrl could provide sufficient letters. The rest is "insert symbol"  

[edc 0]

Thanks, I've always wondered about that.