I don't think the article solved the mystery as the Chinese are not at all unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet.
Chinese students learn the Latin alphabet and use them to spell words before learning Chinese characters. Chinese keyboards only consist of Latin characters. To enter a Chinese character, you type its pronunciation and then select the desired character from a on-screen menu.
"To enter a Chinese character, you type its pronunciation and then select the desired character from a on-screen menu."
Not everyone uses a phonetic typing method. Many people use wubi (五笔) which is based on the structure of the characters. Although this still uses a QWERTY keyboard, I suspect it doesn't help make people more familiar with the roman letters (in terms of memory, or mapping letters to English sounds).
This is interesting, but has anyone noticed that .cn URLs and Chinese .com's seem to always be a combination of ASCII roman characters and arabic numerals, rather than Chinese characters? Why is this? Is writing in pinyin and converting the URL to Chinese undesirable?
On a side note, has anyone ever noticed Chinese characters in the URLs indexed by Baidu? Is Baidu even able to index URLs with non-ASCII Chinese characters? I've only ever seen roman characters in the URLS they index.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 30.2 ms ] threadChinese students learn the Latin alphabet and use them to spell words before learning Chinese characters. Chinese keyboards only consist of Latin characters. To enter a Chinese character, you type its pronunciation and then select the desired character from a on-screen menu.
Not everyone uses a phonetic typing method. Many people use wubi (五笔) which is based on the structure of the characters. Although this still uses a QWERTY keyboard, I suspect it doesn't help make people more familiar with the roman letters (in terms of memory, or mapping letters to English sounds).
On a side note, has anyone ever noticed Chinese characters in the URLs indexed by Baidu? Is Baidu even able to index URLs with non-ASCII Chinese characters? I've only ever seen roman characters in the URLS they index.