Eli5: How do keyboards work for a language like Chinese?

Question

Some Chinese languages like Mandarin have thousands of characters, so how does a keyboard work considering there’s only a finite amount of characters they can use?

In: 14

Answer 1

[Explained previously](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k6t88/eli5_how_do_asian_chinese_japanese_korean_ect_and/)

But the gist of it is Chinese will either use a romanization keyboard (PinYin) or stroke keyboard (CangJie/ZhuYin) or Handwriting (we can write out chinese Han Zhi and our phones will recognize it), then select the words.

If you want to make it easy then you can use the speech recognition or failing that, just use the voice recording function.

Same for Japanese will use a kana keyboard that enable them to key in the kana which will “spellcheck and autocomplete” to the Kanji/kana. For beginners more proficient in romaji Google has the Godan keyboard which enabled romaji input.