Imagine a keyboard with thousands of keys because the language you speak has thousands of characters.
It turns out the most natively spoken language in the world, Mandarin Chinese,
does have thousands of characters. But you can't exactly make a keyboard with 20,000 keys.
So how the heck do our Chinese speaking friends enter characters on their PCs and phones
without pulling their hair out in frustration? There are several common and efficient ways
to do this, but it wasn't always so. Back in the mid-1970s, before word processing was widespread,
there was a rather popular typewriter called the double pigeon. But unlike the typewriters
you're probably used to seeing, it didn't even have keys. Instead, it had well over 2,000 pieces
of movable type, with each piece containing either a character or part of a character.
To pick one, you'd have to move a lever above the character you wanted and then press down,
which would cause the ARM to flip up and punch the character against the paper.
Although the pieces of type were arranged in a logical fashion, it was still quite tedious to use.
But it was around the same time, 1976 to be precise, that inventor Qiubong Fu developed
what's called the Kang Ji input method for keyboards. And if you're wondering why it's
called that, it was named after the mythological inventor of the Chinese writing system.
Anyhow, the Kang Ji system was notable because it used a standard QWERTY keyboard,
alleviating concerns about whether the post-industrial age would end up leaving Chinese speaking
areas behind because their language was one that just couldn't quickly be typed out.
Only a few years after Chu's invention, he released his patent rights, meaning the
Kang Ji system became open source, making it very popular to this day.
But consider this, even if you're not trying to create a keyboard featuring every Chinese
character in existence, it's estimated that an educated Chinese speaker knows between
3 and 8,000 characters. So how can you reduce all that down to just 87 keys?
I'm not quite sure why anyone would think this, but Chinese characters aren't just constructed
at random. Rather, they're often made up of elements sometimes referred to as radicals.
On a Kang Ji keyboard, each Latin character matches up to a common radical. They're sorted,
according to the order of the Latin alphabet. For example, the keys for A through G
roughly correspond to classical elements of nature, such as water or fire.
And once you've decided which character you want to type, you build them up from these radicals,
going from top of the character to the bottom, left to right, and outside to inside,
meaning that you can construct a large number of characters from three or four key sequences
called Kang Ji codes. Of course, these days, there are plenty of software-based tools to
make typing easier for the average Chinese speaker. Similarly to how English speakers will get
suggestions for what word they want as soon as they press the first key, Chinese speakers will
get suggestions based on which radicals they punch in on both PCs and on phones. Which is
especially useful, as there are plenty of Chinese words that are composed of multiple characters.
Kang Ji has been supplanted in popularity by other methods such as WuBi, a similar but
faster shape-based system more geared towards simplified Chinese, and Pinyin, which involves
typing in a romanized version of a Chinese word, which is the version that I've been saying the
whole time in the script, and having software convert it to a Chinese character. But Kang Ji
remains widespread and marked an incredibly important milestone in Chinese technological
development. When you think about it, it's not all that different from how we can form tens of
thousands of English words from just 26 letters instead of having keys that say things like
coconut, jerky, or attractive YouTube post. I didn't write that. That was just in there.
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