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Imagine a keyboard with thousands of keys because the language you speak has thousands of characters.

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It turns out the most natively spoken language in the world, Mandarin Chinese,

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does have thousands of characters. But you can't exactly make a keyboard with 20,000 keys.

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So how the heck do our Chinese speaking friends enter characters on their PCs and phones

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without pulling their hair out in frustration? There are several common and efficient ways

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to do this, but it wasn't always so. Back in the mid-1970s, before word processing was widespread,

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there was a rather popular typewriter called the double pigeon. But unlike the typewriters

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you're probably used to seeing, it didn't even have keys. Instead, it had well over 2,000 pieces

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of movable type, with each piece containing either a character or part of a character.

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To pick one, you'd have to move a lever above the character you wanted and then press down,

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which would cause the ARM to flip up and punch the character against the paper.

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Although the pieces of type were arranged in a logical fashion, it was still quite tedious to use.

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But it was around the same time, 1976 to be precise, that inventor Qiubong Fu developed

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what's called the Kang Ji input method for keyboards. And if you're wondering why it's

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called that, it was named after the mythological inventor of the Chinese writing system.

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Anyhow, the Kang Ji system was notable because it used a standard QWERTY keyboard,

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alleviating concerns about whether the post-industrial age would end up leaving Chinese speaking

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areas behind because their language was one that just couldn't quickly be typed out.

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Only a few years after Chu's invention, he released his patent rights, meaning the

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Kang Ji system became open source, making it very popular to this day.

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But consider this, even if you're not trying to create a keyboard featuring every Chinese

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character in existence, it's estimated that an educated Chinese speaker knows between

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3 and 8,000 characters. So how can you reduce all that down to just 87 keys?

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I'm not quite sure why anyone would think this, but Chinese characters aren't just constructed

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at random. Rather, they're often made up of elements sometimes referred to as radicals.

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On a Kang Ji keyboard, each Latin character matches up to a common radical. They're sorted,

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according to the order of the Latin alphabet. For example, the keys for A through G

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roughly correspond to classical elements of nature, such as water or fire.

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And once you've decided which character you want to type, you build them up from these radicals,

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going from top of the character to the bottom, left to right, and outside to inside,

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meaning that you can construct a large number of characters from three or four key sequences

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called Kang Ji codes. Of course, these days, there are plenty of software-based tools to

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make typing easier for the average Chinese speaker. Similarly to how English speakers will get

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suggestions for what word they want as soon as they press the first key, Chinese speakers will

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get suggestions based on which radicals they punch in on both PCs and on phones. Which is

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especially useful, as there are plenty of Chinese words that are composed of multiple characters.

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Kang Ji has been supplanted in popularity by other methods such as WuBi, a similar but

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faster shape-based system more geared towards simplified Chinese, and Pinyin, which involves

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typing in a romanized version of a Chinese word, which is the version that I've been saying the

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whole time in the script, and having software convert it to a Chinese character. But Kang Ji

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remains widespread and marked an incredibly important milestone in Chinese technological

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development. When you think about it, it's not all that different from how we can form tens of

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thousands of English words from just 26 letters instead of having keys that say things like

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coconut, jerky, or attractive YouTube post. I didn't write that. That was just in there.

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Hey, that was a whole tech wiki. Thanks for watching. Like the video if you liked it,

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