汉字没有字母，中国人怎么打字？
How do Chinese people type without an alphabet?
Name: ________________ Date: ________
“汉字没有字母，中国人怎么打字？”几乎每个学中文的人都琢磨过这个问题。光是常用字就有三千五百个，难道要造一个三千五百个键的键盘吗？答案有点出人意料：中国人打字，敲的正是英文里那二十六个字母。
秘密在于拼音。1958年，全国人民代表大会批准了《汉语拼音方案》，用拉丁字母给汉字标出读音。不久，拼音就走进了小学课堂。没想到几十年后，它摇身一变，成了中国人打字的主要工具。如今大多数中国人，尤其是年轻人，用的都是拼音输入法：敲出“你好”的拼音，屏幕上立刻蹦出一排候选词，选中第一个，“你好”就出来了。
问题在于同音字太多。在三千五百个常用字里，和“是”拼音相同的，不考虑声调的话就有四十多个。所以输入法必须学会“猜”：它揣摩前后文，把最可能的词放在最前头。有人干脆连拼音都懒得打全，每个字只敲第一个字母，输入法常常照样猜得出来。这种偷懒的习惯甚至渗透进了网络用语，“永远的神”“笑死我了”，在网上往往只剩下四个字母：YYDS、XSWL。不知道的人看到，还以为是什么暗号。
拼音并不是唯一的办法。碰到认得却念不出来的字，拼音就无从下手，这时可以改用手写：用手指在屏幕上把字描出来，手机会列出几个长得最像的字供你挑选。另一种办法叫“五笔”，完全不理会读音，只看字形。1983年，王永民推出了五笔字型，把汉字分解成一个个“字根”，用普通键盘上的字母键就能输入，只是得先记住一百多个字根。据说他最早设计的专用键盘有上百个键，后来一步步精简，才成了今天的模样。
字典也面临同样的难题：没有字母表，字该按什么顺序排？拿《新华字典》来说，它提供三种查法。知道读音，就按拼音字母的顺序找，就像在英文词典里找单词一样；不知道读音，就先找部首；连部首也拿不准，只好按笔画多少来找。这本不起眼的小字典1953年出了第一版，到2015年已经累计卖出五亿多册，被吉尼斯世界纪录认定为“最受欢迎的字典”。
名单怎么排，也有讲究。电脑给中文排序，默认的往往是拼音。不过，正式场合的名单，常常“按姓氏笔画排序”：笔画少的姓氏排在前面；笔画一样多，再看第一个笔画，是横的，排在最前面。这样排不分职位高低，谁也说不出什么。所以，名单上要是有人姓丁，他多半排第一：“丁”只有两个笔画，第一个又正好是横。
打字越来越方便，手却越来越生疏。中国人管这叫“提笔忘字”：字认得，用手机也能打出来，可一拿起笔，脑子里就一片空白。《中国青年报》做过一次调查，两千五百多名受访者里，将近百分之九十九的人都有过这种尴尬。2013年，央视办了一档汉字听写节目，还请来一百位成年人，陪着选手一起写，“癞蛤蟆”三个字，只有三成的人写对了。
所以，要是你还在一笔一画地练汉字，别觉得自己落伍了。说不定有一天，你的中国朋友想写“癞蛤蟆”，写到一半，还得回过头来问你。
Key words
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 字母 | zìmǔ | letter (of an alphabet) |
| 造 | zào | to make; to build; to create |
| 键 | jiàn | key (of a keyboard, piano) |
| 键盘 | jiànpán | keyboard |
| 秘密 | mìmì | secret; secret; confidential |
| 批准 | pīzhǔn | to approve; to ratify; to authorize |
| 读音 | dúyīn | pronunciation (of a word or character) |
| 成 | chéng | OK; all right |
| 声调 | shēngdiào | tone (of a syllable) |
| 学会 | xuéhuì | to learn; to master |
| 干脆 | gāncuì | simply; just; might as well |
| 专用 | zhuānyòng | for a special use; dedicated; exclusive |
English (for the teacher)
“Chinese has no alphabet, so how do Chinese people type?” Almost everyone who learns Chinese has wondered about this at some point. There are 3,500 common characters alone; surely nobody builds a keyboard with 3,500 keys? The answer is a little surprising: when Chinese people type, they tap the very same twenty-six letters as English.
The secret is pinyin. In 1958, the National People’s Congress approved the Hanyu Pinyin scheme, which uses Latin letters to show how characters are pronounced. Soon after, pinyin made its way into primary school classrooms. Few could have guessed that decades later it would transform into the main tool Chinese people type with. Today most Chinese people, especially the young, use a pinyin input method: type the pinyin for “nǐ hǎo”, a row of candidate words pops up on the screen at once, pick the first one, and there is “hello”.
The trouble is that too many characters sound alike. Among the 3,500 common characters, more than forty share the pinyin of shì, “to be”, if you ignore the tones. So input methods have to learn to “guess”: they weigh up the context and put the most likely word first. Some people can’t even be bothered to type the whole pinyin and tap only the first letter of each character, and the input method can often still guess what they mean. This lazy habit has even seeped into internet slang, where “the GOAT” and “I’m dying of laughter” often shrink to just four letters: YYDS and XSWL. Anyone not in on it might think they’re some kind of secret code.
Pinyin isn’t the only way. When you meet a character you recognise but can’t pronounce, pinyin gets you nowhere, so you can switch to handwriting: trace the character on the screen with your finger, and the phone lists a few look-alikes for you to choose from. Another method, called Wubi, ignores pronunciation entirely and looks only at a character’s shape. In 1983, Wang Yongmin launched Wubi, which breaks characters down into “roots” and lets you type them with the letter keys of an ordinary keyboard, though first you have to memorise more than a hundred roots. It is said that the first special keyboard he designed had more than a hundred keys, and it was cut down step by step before it took the shape it has today.
Dictionaries face the same problem: without an alphabet, what order should the characters go in? Take the Xinhua Dictionary: it offers three ways to look a character up. If you know the pronunciation, you search in pinyin alphabetical order, just like finding a word in an English dictionary; if you don’t, you start with the radical; and if you’re not even sure of the radical, you have no choice but to go by the number of strokes. This unassuming little dictionary first came out in 1953, had sold more than 500 million copies in total by 2015, and was named the “most popular dictionary” by Guinness World Records.
Putting a list of names in order takes some thought, too. When computers sort Chinese, the default is usually pinyin. But on formal occasions, name lists are often “sorted by the strokes in the surname”: surnames with fewer strokes come first; if the number is the same, you look at the first stroke, and those that start with a horizontal stroke come first of all. That way nobody is ranked by job title, so nobody can complain. So if someone on the list is surnamed Ding, they will most likely be first: the character for Ding has only two strokes, and the first one happens to be horizontal.
Typing keeps getting easier, while people’s hands get rustier. Chinese people call this “tí bǐ wàng zì”, picking up a pen and forgetting the character: you recognise it, you can type it on your phone, but the moment you pick up a pen, your mind goes blank. China Youth Daily once ran a survey: of more than 2,500 respondents, nearly 99 per cent had found themselves in this awkward spot. In 2013, CCTV ran a TV dictation show and invited a hundred adults to write along with the contestants; only three in ten wrote the three characters for “toad” correctly.
So if you’re still practising your characters stroke by stroke, don’t feel old-fashioned. Who knows, one day your Chinese friend may try to write “toad”, get halfway, and have to turn round and ask you.