WEBVTT

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imagine a keyboard with thousands of keys because the language you speak has

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thousands of characters it turns out the most natively spoken language in the

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world Mandarin Chinese does have thousands of characters but you can't

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exactly make a keyboard with 20 000 keys so how the heck do our Chinese speaking

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friends enter characters on their PCS and phones without pulling their hair

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out in frustration there are several common and efficient ways to do this but

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it wasn't always so back in the mid 1970s before word processing was

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widespread there was a rather popular typewriter called the double pigeon but

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unlike the typewriters you're probably used to seeing it didn't even have keys

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instead it had well over 2 000 pieces of

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

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character to pick one you'd have to move a lever above the character you wanted

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and then press down which would cause the ARM to flip up and punch the

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character against the paper although the pieces of type were arranged in a

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logical fashion it was still quite tedious to use but it was around the

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same time 1976 to be precise that inventor Chu bong Fu developed What's

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called the Kung ji input method for keyboards and if you're wondering why

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it's called that it was named after the mythological inventor of the Chinese

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writing system anyhow the kanji system was notable because it used a standard

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qwerty keyboard alleviating concerns about whether the post-industrial age

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would end up leaving chinese-speaking areas behind because their language was

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one that just couldn't quickly be typed out only a few years after Chu's

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invention he released his patent rights meaning the kanji system became open

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source making it very popular to this day but consider this even if you're not

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trying to create a keyboard featuring every Chinese character in existence

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it's estimated that an educated Chinese speaker knows between three and eight

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thousand characters so how can you reduce all that down to just 87 Keys

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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

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but Chinese characters aren't just constructed at random rather they're

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often made up of elements sometimes referred to as radicals on a kanji

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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

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through G roughly correspond to classical elements of nature such as

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water or fire once you've decided which character you want to type you build

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them up from these radicals going from top of the character to the bottom left

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to right and outside to inside meaning that you can construct a large number of

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characters from 3 or four key sequences called kanji codes of course these days

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there are plenty of software-based tools to make typing easier for the average

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Chinese speaker similarly to how English speakers will get suggestions for what

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word they want as soon as they press the first key Chinese speakers will get

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suggestions based on which radicals they punch in on both PCS and on phones which

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is especially useful as there are plenty of Chinese words that are composed of

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multiple characters kanji has been supplanted in popularity by other

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methods such as wooby a similar but faster shape-based system more geared

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towards simplified Chinese and pinyin which involves typing in a romanized

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version of a Chinese word which is the version that I've been saying the whole

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time in the script and having software convert it to a Chinese character but

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kanji remains widespread and marked an

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incredibly important milestone in Chinese technological development when

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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

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things like coconut jerky or attractive

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YouTube host I didn't write that that was just that was just in there hey that

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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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