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 Chu bong Fu developed What's
called the Kung 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 kanji 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 kanji 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 three and eight
thousand characters so how can you reduce all that down to just 87 Keys
we'll tell you right after we thank Samsung for sponsoring this video
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reserve your new device today 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 kanji
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 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 3 or four key sequences called kanji 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 kanji has been supplanted in popularity by other
methods such as wooby 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
kanji 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 host I didn't write that that was just that was just in there hey that
was a whole Tech Wiggy thanks for watching like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it check out
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