kasstri Newbie France clavier-arabe-pro.co Joined 3033 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes
| Message 17 of 19 10 August 2016 at 12:59am | IP Logged |
I have two options for the Arabic
keyboard: Arabic and Arabic QWERTY. Arabic is whatever they use in Egypt, I presume, and
Arabic QWERTY
attempts to pair up the Arabic letters with their closest Latin counterparts
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Rhian Moderator France Joined 6501 days ago 265 posts - 288 votes Speaks: English* Personal Language Map
| Message 18 of 19 12 August 2016 at 12:09am | IP Logged |
Just a reminder that the majority of
members have moved to www.forum.language-
learners.org after software problems here. You are
welcome to post here or there or on both but note
that you need to register on the new site (ie your
HTLAL name and password won't work there). Don't
worry - sign up is much simpler over on the new
site!
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shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4448 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French
| Message 19 of 19 14 August 2016 at 6:23pm | IP Logged |
For the Chinese language, there are 3 popular ways of entering characters:
1. Pinyin (拼音) is the simplest. You go to the your computer Settings on a Mac / PC and install [Chinese Pinyin] as the keyboard. You type the phonetics using the English alphabet and a list of characters would appear. You simply pick and choose the correct character.
Every Chinese character can have 1 of 4 different intonations. When typing you simply leave the intonation markings out.
Note: there is no Chinese spell-checker. You need to proofread your text or you may get some of the characters wrong. For example: the Chinese for the Yangtze River is entered as "chang jiang". The correct characters should be: 长江. If you are not careful, you may enter 场将 which also has the phonetics "chang jiang" but they are not the characters you wanted.
2. Zhuyin (注音) is another method of inputting characters using phonetics. This method originated in Mainland China after the Republic of China was established in the 1910s. Today it is used only in Taiwan.
Zhuyin input does not use the English alphabet but instead it uses a completely different set of characters: ㄅㄆㄇㄈㄉㄊㄋㄌㄍ, etc. In order to enter Chinese characters using Zhuyin, you need to learn over 50 different symbols. There are computers & portable devices with Zhuyin symbols marked on the keys. Takes some practice to find these characters as you are typing.
3. Graphic tablet (手寫版) is probably the least efficient method of inputting Chinese characters. There are several ways of doing it. With a computer, you can plug in a tablet into the USB and use a laser pen to scribble each character 1 by 1. You try to do each character as precisely as possible. Since there are characters that look alike, the computer may confuse between them.
On a portable phone or tablet you usually see a small box at the corner of the screen. Instead of using a laser pen, you use a finger to scribble the characters 1 by 1.
In a place like Hong Kong most people prefer to use a graphic tablet although this is not an efficient way of inputting characters. Hong Kong people speaks Cantonese as opposed to Mandarin on the Chinese mainland. Unlike the rest of China, Hong Kong had not adopted a standardize set of phonetics for the Chinese characters. It gets a bit confusing when different input software recognize slightly different phonetics for the exact same characters. Cantonese-speakers prefer to avoid using phonetics altogether. People are often seen in public places scribbling characters with their fingers.
Edited by shk00design on 14 August 2016 at 6:25pm
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