How does a Chinese language keyboard make all the ideographic words?

In 1958, China officially adopted the "pinyin" system of transcribing all Chinese words uniformily into the Roman alphabet. With this system, every Chinese word can be spelled using the normal English keyboard. Chinese people all learn pinyin early in elementary school, so when they use a computer, they type almost exactly the same as any English speaker. Any Chinese person who went to school can read and write pinyin almost as well as reading and writing Chinese characters.

Chinese computers (and cell phones) have a simple program that displays the available Chinese characters once you type the pinyin. Most Chinese people can type very fast this way. Did you think they were going to use some massive keyboard to send text messages too? By the way, they all love chatting on the net, and they do it with a keyboard identical to yours. They don't need anything laid over the keyboard either.

I've seen one of the massive keyboard you're talking about, but only in America. I could hardly imagine any Chinese person using it. It would be ridiculously inefficient to search for a specific character when any Chinese person can type it with English letters in a second or two.

Combonations of keystrokes. Even on a 101 US Keyboard you can download IME packs that will work, and then purchase the stickers to overlay on the keyboard.

A true Chinese keyboard is massive, and, I would imagine, hard to come by.

check out the third pic down here http://www.spartantailgate.com/forums/msu-red-ceda...