Pinyin, Chinese, Hanja, Mac
Who isn't fascinated by Chinese characters? A single graphic that encapsulates an entire word, concept or idea; it brushes upon essence of linguistic efficiency--deterred only by the fact that there are so many words, concepts and ideas to be represented.
Some manifest their fascination by a permanent inking (which I do not advise). Others follow the stroke and order to inspiration through calligraphy. For me it is enough to simply use them; being able to communicate with an audience so vast is awe-inspiring. With the assistance of modern technology I can use the learning of a language to speak with the world.
So in addition to my mother's tongue, Spanish, my first truly foreign language, Korean, and my dabblings in Japanese, I've started taking a class in Chinese. We've received Chinese names this week, and I asked my professor If I could use the same Chinese characters I used when making my Korean name (In Korean, Chinese characters are called "hanja").
My Korean name is 이강진, Kang-jin Lee. To show her my name, I looked up my name again in my Korean vocab book. I found the characters easily, but I didn't know how to write Chinese on my mac. Once I did, I realized I didn't know the Chinese pronunciation of these characters, so I still couldn't type them. What I needed was was a Hangul(Korean) to Hanja conversion--or a way to select hanja while typing Korean. After a little searching, turns out you can already do that on a Mac. Who knew?
So now I can type to you using Chinese, Korean and two of Japanese's three character systems (the third basically being Chinese)--in addition to the alphabetical systems. Hopefully someone will find this article an easy reference for typing in Chinese on their Mac. Oh, and how to type in Pinyin on a Mac as well.
Some manifest their fascination by a permanent inking (which I do not advise). Others follow the stroke and order to inspiration through calligraphy. For me it is enough to simply use them; being able to communicate with an audience so vast is awe-inspiring. With the assistance of modern technology I can use the learning of a language to speak with the world.
So in addition to my mother's tongue, Spanish, my first truly foreign language, Korean, and my dabblings in Japanese, I've started taking a class in Chinese. We've received Chinese names this week, and I asked my professor If I could use the same Chinese characters I used when making my Korean name (In Korean, Chinese characters are called "hanja").
My Korean name is 이강진, Kang-jin Lee. To show her my name, I looked up my name again in my Korean vocab book. I found the characters easily, but I didn't know how to write Chinese on my mac. Once I did, I realized I didn't know the Chinese pronunciation of these characters, so I still couldn't type them. What I needed was was a Hangul(Korean) to Hanja conversion--or a way to select hanja while typing Korean. After a little searching, turns out you can already do that on a Mac. Who knew?
So now I can type to you using Chinese, Korean and two of Japanese's three character systems (the third basically being Chinese)--in addition to the alphabetical systems. Hopefully someone will find this article an easy reference for typing in Chinese on their Mac. Oh, and how to type in Pinyin on a Mac as well.