Well, this looks like a goddamn nightmare.
Might as well just use a pen to save time…
I know nothing about Chinese characters but you would have to think it’d be easier to break all the characters into basic elements and have a dictionary that told the user what elements to add.
Honzi/Hanzi/Kanji/whatever you want to call them are mostly made of base parts called radicals that form a whole, but the problem is that they are not the same size/position in different characters. For example, the character for lady 女 is squished to the left in the word for good 好 but squished to the bottom in peaceful 安 and squished to the top left in anger 怒.
And it’s not enough to say “why not just split those half character radicals into full characters and make compound terms” because while 好 means ‘good’, 女子 means ‘maiden’.
Seems inefficient.
Relevant username?
I thoroughly recommend the book “The Chinese Typewriter”. It goes through the various challenges that the Chinese language pose. How do you order characters, like in an alphabet? How it was encoded in Morse, or later on, in ASCII. And of course, the various attempts at Chinese typewriting. Actually quite fascinating!
Is there a way to see this without going to twitter?
Yes! I originally found it posted on their TikTok account:
https://www.tiktok.com/@thehuntington/video/7321812764421475630;)
