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Counterpoint: A lot of people in China are as familiar with the latin alphabet as you are with the Cyrillic alphabet: Source: https://newrepublic.com/article/11

Counterpoint: A lot of people in China are as familiar with the latin alphabet as you are with the Cyrillic alphabet: Source: https://newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-websites-secret-meaning-urls https://newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-websit...

qwerty456127 7y ago
I've once seen a Chinese girl texting on a bus stop. She used the ordinary US-looking on-screen keyboard but Chinese hieroglyphs were appearing in the message window as she typed.
- Accacin 7y ago
  Yeah my wife uses this input method too, as I do if writing Mandarin. It's basically typing the pinyin for the characters. However, nearly everyone else in her family uses the type of input where you type 'strokes' of the characters to filter down the character you want to input.
iforgotpassword 7y ago
Sorry, this is wrong. They mainly use the US keyboard layout for input, typing in pinyin (mainland China. Taiwan etc. are indeed different). Every person using a computer not only has to know the Latin alphabet, but also has to know how the characters they want to input are translated into pinyin. Even on the smartphone where thanks to the touch screen you could easily come up with new flexible input methods, they simply ported that concept over. This article doesn't appear well informed, or tries to make the Chinese look stupid. On a similar note there is the common belief that Chinese people, having simplified characters for well over 50 years now, couldn't read the traditional characters still in use in Taiwan and Hong Kong. They are still used for artistic reasons and in calligraphy, which a lot of Chinese people have practiced at some point in their lives. Based on my very limited sample size, I'd argue that a Taiwanese person has more issues reading the simplified characters than vice versa, but then again it's not like all the characters look totally different, so given at least minimal context it shouldn't be too hard going either direction. (end OT rant)

qwerty456127 7y ago

I've once seen a Chinese girl texting on a bus stop. She used the ordinary US-looking on-screen keyboard but Chinese hieroglyphs were appearing in the message window as she typed.

Accacin 7y ago
Yeah my wife uses this input method too, as I do if writing Mandarin. It's basically typing the pinyin for the characters. However, nearly everyone else in her family uses the type of input where you type 'strokes' of the characters to filter down the character you want to input.

iforgotpassword 7y ago

Sorry, this is wrong. They mainly use the US keyboard layout for input, typing in pinyin (mainland China. Taiwan etc. are indeed different). Every person using a computer not only has to know the Latin alphabet, but also has to know how the characters they want to input are translated into pinyin. Even on the smartphone where thanks to the touch screen you could easily come up with new flexible input methods, they simply ported that concept over. This article doesn't appear well informed, or tries to make the Chinese look stupid. On a similar note there is the common belief that Chinese people, having simplified characters for well over 50 years now, couldn't read the traditional characters still in use in Taiwan and Hong Kong. They are still used for artistic reasons and in calligraphy, which a lot of Chinese people have practiced at some point in their lives. Based on my very limited sample size, I'd argue that a Taiwanese person has more issues reading the simplified characters than vice versa, but then again it's not like all the characters look totally different, so given at least minimal context it shouldn't be too hard going either direction. (end OT rant)