When I reviewed Bill Bryson’s excellent book about the English language, Mother Tongue, a couple of years ago, I was particularly taken by his description of the difficulties faced by Chinese typists. I wrote:
Indeed, it’s the comparative anecdotes about other languages that offer tantalising glimpses of just how different things are either side of the linguistic divide. Thanks to its ideogram structure, Chinese language typewriters apparently have 5000 characters and even experienced typists can only turn out a few words a minute. Moreover, there is no such thing as a Chinese alphabetical filing system - so if a secretary dies, the whole office filing system which probably only exists in their head goes with them. Mother Tongue was written in the early 1990s, so whether the Chinese have found a way of taming their own language since then is unclear.
Now Slate has published an article explaining just how the Chinese cope with a 5000 character language in the IT age. [Found via Digg, which also has some amusing reader commentary]
More on Chinese keyboard:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
Open Directory | Technorati: Chinese keyboard
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I watched Chinese people type in Mandarin in Taiwan. They kicked out about 20 words a minute using what looked like a regular IBM keyboard.