汉字没有字母，中国人怎么打字？

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.