Chinese Keyboard

• ZhuYin FuHao

  Also known as bopomofo, the first four characters of the set representing b, p, m, f initials. It consists of 37 characters (21 initials, 16 rhymes including medials) representing the sounds of PuTongHua Mandarin, there are also four extra characters representing tones.

  Initials:

  b p m f
  d t n l
  g k h
  j q x
  zh ch sh r
  z c s

  Medials:

  i u ü
  The character ü is often simplified to u in pinyin spelling, if it its followed by additional letters.

  Rhymes (or Finals):

  a o e ê
  ai ei ao ou
  an en
  ang eng
  er
  The character ê is often simplified to e in pinyin spelling, if it its followed by additional letters.

• CangJie

  25 Chinese characters used as acronyms for character attributes. An extra character key which is unnecessary is included here for completeness.

  More information

• PinYin

  Apart from the letter v, all alphabetic keys on the QWERTY keyboard is used.

Note :

ZhuYin FuHao uses four characters as follows [Initial] + [Medial] + [Rhyme] + [Tone]. An example is the sound guang3 which is represented as �|������ [g]+[u]+[ang]+[tone 3]. The keyboard does not give the first tone, which is often given as a horizontal line above the first vowel in PinYin romanisation. Tone 2 is [��], Tone 3 as given above is [��], Tone 4 is [��], whilst as a result of the rules of tone sandhi for Mandarin Putonghua, the unstressed tone is sometimes written with the dot, [�D].

Non - ZhuYin Characters

© Dylan W.H. Sung 2000

This page was created on Monday 20th December 1999,
and was recently updated on Saturday 29th January 2000.