Jason White wrote:
Peter Ross <Peter.Ross@bogen.in-berlin.de> wrote:
Hi all,
do you know about a phone with QWERTY keyboard and Chinese Pinyin support available in Australia?
No, but I would be very surprised if the support wasn't a standard component of modern mobile operating systems. I can imagine that you might have to download language-specific files if they aren't included by default for reasons of storage capacity.
Last time I looked the iPad's onscreen keyboard didn't even do dvorak...
Actually, I don't know how thousands of Chinese characters are mapped to a qwerty keyboard.
[Concerning computer keyboards, not handsets...] AIUI hanzí input methods (inc. pinyin) basically have you spell it out more-or-less phonetically on qwerty, then allow you to select amongst homophones. Hangul and (I think) kana have few enough graphemes that you basically have one key per grapheme, plus a few dead keys (a la diacritics in western europe). Incidentally, Hangul keyboard layout has *always* been vowels on one side, consonants on the other. Take that, qwerty!
Finding a phone with Chinese printed on it and with original documentation might be a little more difficult, but if the user is prepared to work with a device that has English labels printed on the controls then I would expect it to be entirely a matter of software.
I don't think that's an issue for Mandarin; you just use qwerty. For kana and hangul, of course, have alternate graphemes on the keys. If you can touch-type, it's not TOO hard to simply remember the mappings without looking at the keys -- at least if you can see the graphemes appear on screen. I struggle a bit to type Korean words accurately when I only get diamonds on the screen ;-)