Hello welcome back. Let me start this lesson by asking you a question. If there's no alphabet
in chinese, then how do chinese people type? Have you ever thought about this question
before? If you are little unsure about it. Then you are in good company.
Alright let me tell you how it works, this is what the chinese keyboard looks like. Surprise! It
is exactly the same as the english keyboard. It's the same because actually you type in
chinese in almost the same way that you type in english. When you type in english, you just
hit the letters that you use to spell the words. Right? So to type the word apple, you
just hit the keys a-p-p-l-e right? In chinese, we do the same thing. Using pinyin, so to
type the word wǒ, you just need to touch the keys for w-o, you don't even have to worry
about tones. You just input the letters. What happens next is truly awesome. The computer
does the hard work for you. After you type in w-o, the computer pulls up a list of characters
that it thinks you might have in mind. And the characters are always sorted by frequency
with the most commonly used characters at the top of the list. So when you type in chinese,
you first need to spell out the words in pinyin. And then look at a list of characters generated
by the computer and pick out the one that you want. So, can you see how the process
of typing in chinese is essentially just recognizing or reading. And recognizing is not a difficult
task really. Your brain is so good at identifying and distinguishing between images that looks
similar. You can probably identify several different breeds of dogs and several different
cellphone models. And you will be able to accurately pick out the friend's face everytime
even if the people in the lineup beside him look very similar to him. You recognize a
person's face by their various features like their eyes, nose, mouth, hair and skin right?
Well, I'm gonna teach you how to recognize characters in a similar way by paying attention
to the differences in the various components of characters. And then, once you can recognize
characters, you will be able to both read and type chinese. Now let's talk about writing
chinese by hand. Handwriting in chinese is a totally different skill than typing. The
difference between typing and writing by hand is like the difference between picking out
your friend's face from a mugshot lineup and drawing a sketch of your friend's face from
memory. It takes a lot more time and effort to master writing characters by hand from
memory. It's a big challenge. But for some people, it's worth the extra effort. Maybe
you are a visual or artistic person, and will enjoy writing by hand. Or maybe you think
that you remember characters better if you write them by hand. These are good reasons
to take on the challenge and I definitely want to support you if you decide to go that
route. We will provide you some materials and resources to help you alone the way. But
for most people, learning how to read and type is all you need to know. Even chinese
people don't write characters by hand very often these days. Almost all writing is done
on the computer or device. So chinese people can often read and type really well. But they
are losing their ability to write chinese by hand. It's not uncommon for a chinese person
to completely forget how to write a character, but if they see it, they will recognize it
immediately. Recognizing characters is the skill that you really need to be considered
literate in chinese these days. So that's why in this course, we are going to primarily
focus on reading and typing. Your homework for this lesson is to download the reference
sheet that shows you how to setup your computer or mobile device for inputting chinese. If
the thought of configuring a computer or device scares you, don't worry. It's a really simple
process and we will guide you through it. Once you got that set up, you will almost
be ready to start reading and typing many of the things that you already know how say
in chinese. But first, we've got just one more introductory lesson, I want to show you
more about how our course is set up, so you know what to expect.
Alright, see you next time. Zài jiàn.