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Akima:

--- Quote from: tender on 11 Aug 2012, 14:44 ---For special characters: Just install a different keyboard layout. Much easier over time.
--- End quote ---
You alphabet-users have no idea... Trying to produce a useful keyboard for the Chinese writing system was so hard that we basically gave up on the idea. Instead we use "input methods", which allow us to type Chinese using standard alphabetic "roughly-100-key" keyboards. This is, of course, super-convenient for people like me who need to type Chinese and English.

The shortcut to toggle between your last two keyboard modes on a Mac is Cmd-Space, or Cmd-Opt-Space to scroll through all your active modes. Apple's built-in support for Chinese is pretty good out of the box, offering several modes for Traditional and Simplified characters, but if you want a pinyin method, QIM is better.

A keyboard shortcut that surprisingly few people seem to know is that tapping the space-bar in your web-browser will scroll down the page.

pwhodges:
The main product of the Japanese company who were agents for my software in the early 1980s was keyboards for inputting Kanji.  To the best of my recollection they had a variety of different sorts, some synthetic, where you typed the various strokes making up a character, and some with (I think) ten characters per key and ten shift keys to select them.  These were about as portable as a small mixing desk.

Omega Entity:
Those would have been interesting to see! I do have a Japanese keyboard, but the modern variety - there's only a few extra keys on it that I'm aware of. On the new ones, you can just type in the hiragana or katakana (using the phonetics) and select what kanji, if any, you'd want to use after you hit the spacebar to move on the the next word.

Akima:

--- Quote from: Omega Entity on 20 Aug 2012, 08:26 ---On the new ones, you can just type in the hiragana or katakana (using the phonetics) and select what kanji, if any, you'd want to use after you hit the spacebar to move on the the next word.
--- End quote ---
I forgot to mention earlier, showing my PRC roots, keyboards designed for the Zhuyin Fuhao phonetic system which work in a similar way. This was abandoned in the PRC in favour of the Pinyin system in the early 1950s, but it's still widely used in Taiwan:



Pinyin-based Chinese input-methods work in a similar sort of way. You type in phonetic representations of the sound of a syllable, and the input-method offers its "best guess" at the characters you want in a ranked list. To select the "first cab off the rank" you just press the space-bar. The more intelligent input-methods are pretty good at putting what you intended to write at the front of the queue, especially when given a few syllables to match against their dictionaries. Sometimes though, you have to scroll through several lines of character-choices in a menu, and select the one you want by number. Having done so, the better input-methods "remember" that character and offer it as a higher priority next time, gradually customising themselves to the words you use most often. Many allow common words and even phrases to be typed with a single keystroke per syllable, but no phonetic system compares with the stroke-based Wubi for sheer speed (or steep learning curve).

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