Chinese Character Input Methods on computer

Because the Chinese language is a logographic language in which one "character" corresponds roughly to one "word" or meaning there are vastly more characters, or glyphs, than there are keys on a standard computer keyboard.

To allow the input of Chinese using standard keyboards a variety of keyboard input methods have been designed.

Keyboard input methods can be classified in 3 main types: by encoding, by pronunciation, and by structure of the characters. The following are just some samples of Chinese input methods. Many of those input methods have variations. Full Pinyin and Double Pinyin are variation of the Pinyin input method. In addition, the methods which require the user to select a character from a menu generally have sophisticated methods for guessing which characters the user intends based on context.

Different people are most comfortably with different methods and each standard has its strengths and weaknesses. For example, for someone who is already familiar with pinyin, the pinyin method can be learned most quickly. However, the maximum typing rate is limited, and learning the system is difficult for some who doesn't know pinyin. Wubi takes much effort to learn, but expert typists can enter text much faster than the phonetic methods. Because of these factors, there is no likelihood of a "standard" method evolving.


Other means of inputting Chinese characters are not widely used but include stylus and tablet, with hand-writing recognition software, as the most common alternative, and then OCR optical character recognition (OCR) and voice recognition. As with English language all these methods suffer from high error rates.

1. Pronunciation

Zhuyin

"The Notation of Annotated Sounds", often abbreviated as Zhuyin, or known as Bopomofo for the first four syllables in this Chinese phonetic symbols, is the national phonetic system of the Republic of China (based on Taiwan ) for teaching the Chinese languages, especially Mandarin to illiterate Mandarin-speaking children. The system uses 37 special symbols to represent the Mandarin sounds: 21 consonants and 16 vowels. There is a one symbol-one sound correspondence.


Pinyin

Pinyin literally means "join together sounds" (a less literal translation being "phoneticize", "spell" or "transcription") in Chinese and usually refers to Hanyu pinyin, which is a system of romanization (phonetic notation and transliteration to roman script) for Mandarin Chinese used in the People's Republic of China. Pinyin was approved in 1958 and adopted in 1979 by its government. It superseded older transcriptions like the Wade-Giles system (1859; modified 1912) or Bopomofo. Similar systems have been designed for Chinese dialects and non-Han minority languages in the PRC. Cantonese also has a pinyin-type system called Penkyamp, whose name derives from the same word as pinyin, albeit articulated in the Cantonese dialect.


Since then, pinyin has been accepted by the Library of Congress, The American Library Association, and most international institutions as the transcription system for Mandarin. In 1979 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted pinyin as the standard romanization for Modern Chinese.


2.Character Structure

Five Stroke method

The Wubi Hua, or Five Stroke method, is a Chinese input method for writing text on a computer. It is based on the stroke order of a word, and can be input using only a numerical keypad. Although it is possible to input Traditional Chinese characters with this method, this method is often associated with Simplified Chinese characters.


Each of the five keys from 1 to 5 are assigned a certain type of stroke: 1 for horizontal strokes, 2 for vertical strokes, 3 for downwards right-to-left strokes, 4 for dot strokes or downwards left-to-right strokes, and 5 for all other strokes. To input any character, simply press the keys corresponding to the first four strokes of a character and the key corresponding to the last stroke of a character. For characters four strokes or less, press 0 after the last stroke.


Wubi Hua is one of the easiest to learn methods, but it tends to be vague (a Wubi Hua code will normally match tens or hundreds of characters), and each character has a unique code (thus, characters whose stroke order are frequently transposed due to a person's writing style cannot easily be found).