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Cake day: July 25th, 2023
  • orangesitehater@lemmygrad.mltoComradeship // Freechat@lemmygrad.ml•recommendation for chinese keyboards?
    2·
    1 year ago

    First thing you have to understand is that there are multiple competing methods for typing chinese called “input methods”. It’s a piece of software that converts keypresses to actual characters. Some of these input methods require extra labels on the keyboard and some don’t. The Big ones are:

    Pinyin Input, this is popular in the mainland but imo is slow and if you’re not a native speaker is gping to stunt your ability to learn how to actially write Chinese. It doesn’t require any extra labels compared to US layout.

    五筆, it’s a component based input method, which maps radicals into different key strokes. This used to be popular in the mainland but isn’t used as much anymore. It requires additional key labels. Generally before computers were good at text prediction you could type much faster with component based input methods than with phonetic ones.

    倉頡, basiscally works the same as 五筆 but with different labels. This one is still kinda popular in Cantonese speaking areas.

    ㄅㄆㄇㄈ is another phonetic input method used in Taiwan. Unlike Pinyin it needs labels for the bopomofo phonetic symbols. Same problem as Pinyin though.

    四角 uses only the numpad, and is based off telegraph codes. No extra labels needed.

    Nowadays the default for keyboards in the mainland is to just not have any labels(eg. same as in the US). Outside the mainland there are keyboards that look like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Mtr_keyboard_1.jpg which has labels for 倉頡，bopomofo, 大易, and English). But obviously if you’re using a specific input method like 五筆 you would want a keyboard with the appropriate labels like this: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:小霸王学习机_SB-486D_正面.jpg

    I recommend you go on amazon or aliexpress and just lookup wubi, cangjie etc.