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?
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Mandarin and Cantonese is different spoken languages while Chinese is a single written language (with traditional and simplified variants). This means that people in China might not speak the same language but they can still write to each other. This is because each letter in Chinese represent an idea, word, instead of a specific sound as in western languages. However each Chinese spoken language does have a phonetic alphabet constructed for them as well. This is done by using singe syllable words and just stringing them together. And when typing on a keyboard this is the language you are using. The computer is then used to translate this phonetic text into the full Chinese character set.
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