3 ms·

If you want to write Chinese text on a computer - you still have to use Latin alphabet, because it's not possible to put thousands of characters on a keyboard.

• afiori 3y ago
  The fact that you can write Chinese in Pinyin does not mean that Pinyin would be a good writing system between humans.
• uranusjr 3y ago
  Eh, you can find at least three (Traditional) Chinese input methods on any given modern system, and Pinyin is only one of them. Cangjie and Bopomofo require no understanding to Latin alphabets. Not to mention there are other less used methods such as Boshiamy.
  • jefftk 3y ago
    And speech to text!
    • zirgs 3y ago
      Speech to text is very impractical and error-prone.
      • jefftk 3y ago
        Talking to a Chinese-speaking coworker, my understanding had been that speech to text was very popular in China, especially on phones?
        • rahimnathwani 3y ago
          Yes it is. Tangent: Anthropic's CEO worked on Mandarin speech recognition at Baidu: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02595 https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02595
        • zirgs 3y ago
          OK, but it doesn't work in situations where you don't want others to hear what you type. And in places with lots of noise.
          • jefftk 3y ago
            In English I use speech to text a lot (including completely substituting it for typing for a year when I had wrist issues). If your microphone is right next to your mouth and you're using good software it works in surprisingly noisy environments: I can talk quietly directly into my mic on the subway without issues. And when I'm at my desk I use a boom mic next to my mouth, with similar benefits. Quiet environments were, for me, more of an issue: it combines very poorly with open plan offices since you bother the people around you.
  • zirgs 3y ago
    As I understand - Pinyin is still the most popular one. It also is compatible with all standard Latin keyboards and doesn't require touchscreens or microphones. So pretty much all educated Chinese people are familiar with the Latin alphabet. But for most people outside China - the Chinese alphabet looks like gibberish.
    • robjan 3y ago
      Pinyin is used in regions where Simplified Chinese is the predominant written language, but other systems are generally used in regions where traditional Chinese is the written language e.g Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan
• lucas_codes 3y ago
  In Taiwan, they don't use Latin script to type, but a phonetic script based on character radicals called bopomofo
• jan_Inkepa 3y ago
  >If you want to write Chinese text on a computer - you still have to use Latin alphabet, Non-native Chinese-Script language learner - I use touchpad stroke-input on my macbook 50% of the time (and touchscreen stroke input on phone 100% of the time).
• somat 3y ago
  This is an interesting question. computers deal in numbers. but were originated in a latin alphabet and are optimized around an alphabet style of processing. while we managed to jam chinese into unicode by treating it as if it were just a big alphabet. this is not entirly correct and there is a lot of information lost in the process[1]. what would a native chinese computer system have looked like? However note perhaps the simplicity of the latin alphabet(a small set of separated characters) lent itself well to a simple implementation on early computers. which got them out of numerical processing earlier than if they had to speak chinese or even something like arabic where the written language has advanced to the point where the connected cursive form was the only correct form. the rendering of which would be tricky for early computers. note that english has a connected cursive form, the art of which has just about been destroyed by computers. 1. I don't read(or speak) chinese. but the characters are composed of sub characters and stroke order that may provide hints or insight into the nature of the character. Or they may not, I don't know, I don't read chinese.
• JCharante 3y ago
  You don’t have to use pinyin to type Chinese on a computer. You can use the zhuyin input method.