Chinese Keyboard

I always wondered how a Chinese keyboard would look like, and how it works.

Now I know :)

On a Dutch blog I found an explanation:(http://www.blablablog.nl/B1038127581/C115502288/E601033558/index.html)

Han, he studies Chinese, explaines how it works. But it is still quite complicated.

I translated the explanation from Han.

In China you have two ways to write Chinese characters: graphic by ‘drawing’ the character or phonetically by writing the pronunciation in western lettering.

Phonetic
In the phonetic way (Chinese call it ‘pinyin’) they type the Chinese character in western lettering. For instance, when you want to write ‘heaven’, you type ‘tian’ en then you get a list of characters which are pronounced as ‘tian’.

Sometimes you see this: ‘tian3’. The 3 behind ‘tian’ gives an indication of the pitch. This way you can narrow down the number of characters that will be given.
On every key of the Chinese keyboard are 4 signs and the two on top are used for the phonetic entry.

Graphic
In the graphic method the different parts of the characters are defined one by one and that will create the character. The two symbols on the bottom of the key are used for this method.