A CHINESE ALPHABET: QWERTY TO HÀNZÌ

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A CHINESE ALPHABET: QWERTY TO HÀNZÌ



Are you curious about Chinese writing, but find it a bit daunting? Have you ever wished you could just look at an unfamiliar Chinese character and input it, without needing to have memorized its reading or its meaning?To get more news about china alphabet, you can visit shine news official website.

If so, then today’s post is for you! It introduces a wonderful Chinese character input system called Cāngjié. Note that the letter indicates the sounds [ts]. It’s named after the legendary four-eyed inventor of writing in China. Using the 26 keys of the Qwerty keyboard, we can input Chinese characters (and punctuation) by breaking them down into their constituent parts. In this system there are 24 basic characters, and all the thousands of others are treated as combinations of these elements. Chinese characters, (simplified 汉字), are known by many names: “Sinograms” (from the Greek name of China), “Hànzì” (from Mandarin), “Hanja” (from Korean 한자), and “Kanji” (from Japanese かんじ). Whatever you prefer to call them, they are the most complex writing system in use today.

One of my absolute favorite features of the Cāngjié input system, as opposed to others that I’ve learned, is that Cāngjié lets us input and look up characters that we have never encountered before! What this means is that it’s not tied to any particular language or dialect in the way phonetic input systems are. Therefore I hope that this post will be useful not just to learners of Standard Chinese, but also to students of other dialects, as well as students of Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and to anyone interested in reading, using, or just knowing more about Chinese characters. (Which, who wouldn’t?)
STEP 1: THE BASIC TWENTY-FOUR
Table 1 introduces the system’s 24 basic characters (letters X and Z have special uses that we won’t cover in this post), as well as some custom mnemonic prompts to help you associate each keyboard key with its Chinese character shapes. There are keyboards with these basic characters printed on the keys, as well as stickers you can affix to your keyboard. However, if you’re able to memorize these pairings, you won’t need to be reliant on specific hardware.
STEP 2: VARIANT FORMS
In the paragraph above we saw a few variant forms related to the basic 24 character forms (⼁ from 中, ⼐ from 山). Recognizing such variants is an essential part of using Cāngjié input! Many variants are straightforwardly related to the basic characters, but a few are unexpected. I’ve arranged most of the important variant forms into Table 2 to make the relationships clear.
OVERVIEW: TWO-PART COMBINATIONS
Here is a spreadsheet showing all characters that the Cāngjié system breaks into two components: each first component gets its own row, and each second component its own column. Several cells have more than one character, as these are treated by the Cāngjié system as having the same components in the same order.

Let’s consider some characters in Row C of the spreadsheet, meaning those with the first component 金 (Gold). In the first few characters we can clearly see the same basic form on the left side: 鈤 鈅 鈥 釷. In Column I, however, we find 公, which lacks 金. Instead it has the upper portion ハ, which is a subtractive variant of Gold (see column (c) in Table 2 above). By “subtractive variant” I mean that the form is derived by leaving out certain strokes of the basic character. Looking a bit further in the Gold row of the spreadsheet, in Column K we find a cell with the two characters 父 釱. Here again we find the variant ハ in the first, versus the full form 金 in the second. The second component of both of these is, in the Cāngjié system, 大: in 釱 we see the basic shape, while 父 has the subtractive variant 乂.