Name: How China Conquered The Keyboard
Uploaded: 2022-01-04T07:24:11.000Z
Duration: 21 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

- [Narrator] There's no Chinese alphabet.

Instead, each word is represented by a symbol or character.

- How on Earth did a language with tens of thousands

- [Narrator] Here is a world of communication,

tailored for your needs of today and tomorrow.

- [Narrator] What really accounts for China's meteoric rise

Today, it is home to 12.5 million people,

and home to some of the largest tech companies

This city is emblematic of China's technological rise

It's an explosion in technology and development

that has really never happened before in human history.

From an agrarian society to a technological powerhouse

China almost didn't become the technological powerhouse.

So how did they fit their language onto this keyboard?

into the divide between Taiwan and mainland China,

It's a story of how China took a keyboard

that was developed for a vastly different language system

It's a fascinating story of culture and history

and technology, and I want to share it with you.

- [Narrator] A large part of China's population

- [Narrator] I really don't quite understand

- To understand how Chinese speakers type on a keyboard

like this, I talk to my friend Mangle Kuo,

Mangle has lived in both China and Taiwan.

He's technologically savvy and helped me understand

how people type, not just on their keyboard

- So basically growing up as a Chinese or Taiwanese,

you have to learn how to write those characters.

And then you learn the, like the pronunciation system

And in China, that's pinyin, and in Taiwan, that's zhuyin.

Most languages are written with an alphabet.

Each letter in that alphabet represents a sound.

And when you string those sounds together, you make a word.

- Chinese uses complex characters for each word,

Each one of these characters represents a different thing,

an object, the feeling, a concept, a verb.

All in all, there're upwards of 70 or 80 thousand

It worked in China for a really long time

because you can use a brush or a pen to write stuff out.

- I like that. It's like if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

This is the mechanism to which people not just communicate

the software and programs that we all use all the time.

When this started to take over, China had a real problem.

Listen, I need to just pause to tell you about something

which is that investing money is hard, sometimes.

And honestly, I'm like in my 30s now and I just sort of

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How China Conquered The Keyboard

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