How do chinese or japanese PC keyboards work when they have thousands of different characters
In: Technology
Both Japanese and Chinese use pinyin (EDIT: pinyin for chinese, romanji for japanese, but effectively the same method) or phoentic spelling, ie by typing the pronunciation of the word in English. Downside of this is that many words are pronounced the same and is very heavily contextual. However the predictive function of the input method help gives you the most likely word you want to use. That should be good enough for general use.
For Chinese however another method is cangjie. This one breaks down each character into pen strokes, like a horizontal line, vertical line, a curve etc. This method almost always give you the exact character you need, but is way harder to learn. There are 50+ pen strokes to learn and a single letter on the keyboard can represent multiple types of strokes However it can be faster than pinyin if you are equally proficient in cangjie and pinyin, especially if you do professional writing.
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