Pinyin

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Pinyin

                Most people look at a language such as Chinese or Japanese and wonder how you would type characters of these languages into a computer.  Luckily, I have studied Chinese for three years, and can answer this question, for Chinese at least.  Common belief is that in these countries, there are giant keyboards that consist of every possible character in the language, but this is definitely not the case.  The most common input method for Mandarin Chinese is Pinyin, pronounced peen-yeen.  It directly translates to ‘spell sound.’  Basically, it uses English letters to spell out how the Chinese words sound, with some letters assigned different sounds that aren’t really used in English or other European languages.  When a word is typed in, a box with characters that correspond to that sound pops up, and one must select the correct character he/she intends to use.  Again, this is the most common input method, and is the method taught at most schools around the world. 

                Pinyin is a phonetic-based input method, meaning that it uses sounds to input characters.  There are at least ten other phonetic-based systems like this.  Phonetic-based methods are easy to learn, but limit speed, as the correct character must constantly be selected after each character.  However, there are also dozens of stroke-based or shape-based input methods, which assign each of the different strokes or radicals to keys on the English keyboard, and these are sequentially typed to literally ‘write’ the word, in a sense.  Although these methods are more difficult and take more time to learn, people that use them are much faster than those who use phonetic-based methods.  The most common stroke-based Chinese input method is called Wubi, pronounced woo-bee.  I would assume that Japanese and Korean input methods are similar to the Chinese methods.

                There are a few different ways to gain the ability to use Pinyin or other systems onto your computer.  First of all, all Windows computers come with CDs that contain software to install East Asian, Arabic, and many other character-using languages onto your computer.  Macintosh computers probably have a way to install this software also, but I am not familiar with them.  Also, there are hundreds of websites on the internet where you can type in Pinyin, and it will display characters which you copy-and-paste wherever you desire.  Basically, if you have internet, you can type in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, or any language you wish.