How do you type on a computer in Chinese?

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My mom just sent me an email asking me "Does a Chinese computer keyboard have English letters or Chinese characters? If it's characters, aren't there too many for a keyboard? If it's letters, does everyone know western letters? Is it done phonetically?"

I remember that this was a question that I had before coming to China. I always imagined a giant computer keyboard the size of a city block with tiny little buttons for each character. Ha ha!

Well, I wrote her back a long response that I felt deserved a presence here on my blog. I must warn you, it's a little dry.

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For inputing Chinese characters onto computers, there are two main systems:
1) Pinyin -
Most computer users in China use pinyin, which is the phonetic system of Chinese. Chinese characters are all one syllable words. When written in the pinyin system, they range from 1-6 letters (i.e. o, wo, shi, shen, sheng, shuang). Pinyin is written with no reference to tones. For each combination of pinyin characters, there can be many many different possibilities of characters with completely different characters. For example, "sheng" can be 生，省，升，声，剩， 胜，。。。 There are programs on computers in China in which you type pinyin and they give you all of the possible characters for that specific pinyin. On my computer, I turn this program on by merely pressing the shift button a single time on its own. These programs give you the most commonly used characters first, followed by less common characters.
Now, it would be quite tedious if you had to pick from a list of characters each time that you wrote a single word. That's why some of these programs have gotten very good at predicting what you want to be saying on the basis of multiple words being entered at the same time. I'm not positive, but I believe that they use language syntax to accomplish this. I'll give you an example to let you know what I mean. I want to write the phrase 《我的妈妈很漂亮》 (My mom is very pretty), which in pinyin is "wo de mama hen piaoliang." If I type "wo" using my program, I get 56 different characters to choose from. However, if I write "wo de" the program knows that these must be two separate characters because there is know "wode" character. It now gives me only 4 combinations of characters that would fit together according to the syntactic rules of Chinese. If I write "wo de mama hen piaoliang," it only gives me one option, which is the correct one. I use the Google Pinyin prediction program, which in my experience is by far the best pinyin predictor.

2) Stroke order -
I don't use this method on my computer. However, I do use it on my cell phone to look up characters that I don't know how to pronounce. So, I will use my cell phone as an example.
Chinese characters my look complicated, but they are made up of a finite number of different types of strokes. For example, there is a type of stroke that goes horizontal from left-to-right, one that goes vertical up-to-down, one that goes up to down and left-to-right (i.e. diagonal), one that is a dot, one that starts vertical left-to-right then goes vertical up-to-down,... There are keyboards out there that contain all of those different strokes, but in my opinion they are really unnecessary. What cell phones do is group those different strokes into a very small number of groups. On my cell phone, for example, the 1 button is for all strokes that go from left-to-right. The 2 button is for all vertical strokes. The 3 button is for all strokes that go diagonal from left-to-right. The 4 button is for all strokes that are either short dots or go diagonal from right-to-left. The 5 button is what I refer to as the "crazy button." It is for all of the "crazy" strokes that curve, dip, and dive (like one that is half vertical and half horizontal and has a weird little hook on the end).
In addition to being a finite number of strokes, there are also a specific set of rules that dictate the order in which strokes must be drawn in order to make a character correctly. For example, according to the rules of stroke order, 十 must be written with the horizontal stroke first followed by the vertical stroke. Not the other way around. So, if I want to write 十 on my cell phone, I simply press 1 and then 2. I'm not going to explain these rules right now, because they're very complicated and I really only understand the basic principles, not the detailed rules. Now, when I press 1 and then 2, my cell phone gives me 十 as well as a long list of other characters (丁，去，要， 下，过，可，。。。）. These characters also begin with a horizontal stroke followed by a vertical stroke. The characters with exactly horizontal stroke followed by vertical stroke (十 and 丁) come first, followed my more complicated characters. If I press, 1, 2, 1, 5, 2, the first character will be 去, because it is the only character with exactly those strokes in exactly that order. Following characters merely begin with those strokes.

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Comments

[Cristobal]

Borrrrring
Part of my brain literally just melted that was so boring.

[NYChinese]

the same question
Interesting blogs...I remember the first question I had when i landed in the states was :"How do you type Chinese on a cell phone?"...lol

[Audiooxyd]

Very good
Thank you very much! I've searched a long time and now I've found this very useful answer. It seems that nobody is interested in this topic on the whole internet. Your answer is the only one i've found. Thanx ^_^