Because the Chinese language uses a logographic script—one in which one "character" corresponds roughly to one "word" or meaning—there are vastly more characters, or glyphs, than there are keys on a standard computer keyboard.

A variety of keyboard input method editors or IMEs have been designed to allow the input of Chinese characters using standard keyboards.

Keyboard input methods can be classified in three main types: by encoding, by pronunciation, and by structure of the characters. The following are just some samples of Chinese input methods. Many of those input methods have variations. Full Pinyin and Double Pinyin are variations of the Pinyin input method. In addition, the methods which require the user to select a character from a menu generally have sophisticated methods for guessing which characters the user intends based on context.

Different people are most comfortable with different methods and each standard has its strengths and weaknesses. For example, for someone who is already familiar with Pinyin, the Pinyin method can be learned most quickly. However, the maximum typing rate is limited, and learning the system is difficult. Wubi takes much effort to learn, but expert typists can enter text much faster than the phonetic methods. Because of these factors, there is no likelihood of a "standard" method evolving.

Other means of inputting Chinese characters are not widely used but include stylus and tablet, with hand-writing recognition software, as the most common alternative, and then OCR and voice recognition. As with the English language, all these methods suffer from high error rates, though the error rates are acceptable to many users.

Yet some systems allow Chinese characters to be input by typing their equivalent English words.

Pronunciation

• Zhuyin (注音)
• Pinyin (拼音)
• Cantonese Pinyin (粤语拼音)

Character structure

• Wubi method (五筆字型; 五笔字型)
• Cangjie method (倉頡; 仓颉)
• Simplified Cangjie (簡易倉頡, known as 速成 on Windows systems)
• CKC Chinese Input System (縱橫輸入法)
• Shouwei method (首尾字型)
• Zheng code method (鄭碼; 郑码)
• Dayi method (大易)
• Five-stroke method (五笔划)
• Four corner method (四角碼; 四角码)
• Stroke count method (筆畫; 笔画)
• Q9 method (九方輸入法)

Combination of pronunciation and character structure

• Boshiamy method (嘸蝦米)
• Tze-loi method (子來; 子来)
• Renzhi code method (認知碼; 认知码)
• Shou-wei Hao-ma method (首尾號碼)

See also

Character encodings

Main article: Chinese character encoding

• Big5
• Guobiao code (GB)
• Neima (内码)
• Unicode (国际区位码)
• Telegraph code (电报码)

Other

• Input method editor
• English-Chinese translation
• Han unification