- [Narrator] There's no Chinese alphabet. Instead, each word is represented
by a symbol or character. (air whooshing) - How on Earth did a language
with tens of thousands of characters fit onto this keyboard? - [Narrator] Here is a
world of communication, tailored for your needs
of today and tomorrow. - [Narrator] What really accounts
for China's meteoric rise as a major global power? - This is Shenzhen. It's a city in the south of China. I've actually been there. But back in the 1980s, this was just a sleepy fishing village with less than, like 100,000 people. Today, it is home to 12.5 million people, a giant metropolis with huge buildings and home to some of the
largest tech companies on the planet. This city is emblematic of
China's technological rise over the last 40 years. 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 in just a couple of decades. - That's fast. - This almost didn't happen. China almost didn't become
the technological powerhouse. And what held them back is something I have thought about a lot, which is this keyboard. This keyboard has like, 80 or so keys, and the Chinese language has like tens of thousands of characters. So how did they fit their
language onto this keyboard? To answer that question, you have to dive deep into modern China, into Chairman Mao, into the divide between
Taiwan and mainland China, who despite speaking the same language use very different typing methods, all because of geopolitics. It's a story of how China took a keyboard that was developed for a vastly
different language system and mastered it, mastered it better than we did here in the West. It's a fascinating story
of culture and history and technology, and I
want to share it with you. - [Narrator] Here is China. - [Narrator] It's become a keystone of national economic policy. - [Narrator] A large part
of China's population lives in large cities. - [Narrator] I really
don't quite understand everything that's happening. (upbeat music) - To understand how Chinese
speakers type on a keyboard like this, I talk to my friend Mangle Kuo, who's currently in quarantine in Taiwan. - I just came back and quarantine in Taiwan's quarantine hotel. - Oh, my gosh. Wow. Mangle has lived in both China and Taiwan. He's technologically savvy
and helped me understand how people type, not
just on their keyboard but on their phone. - So basically growing up
as a Chinese or Taiwanese, you have to learn how to
write those characters. That's kind of the first thing first. And then you learn the, like
the pronunciation system behind all the characters. And in China, that's pinyin,
and in Taiwan, that's zhuyin. - So let's break this down. 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. It seems so intuitive as if like this is the only way to do it. But in Chinese, - There's another way. - Chinese uses complex
characters for each word, so every word is a character. 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 of these characters. This system was just fine. 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 qwerty keyboard. It's called the qwerty keyboard because I mean, just look at it. This is the mechanism to which
people not just communicate with each other, but code the world, 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
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how to fit this onto this, and fast, because the world of computing started to explode in the
70s, and 80s, and 90s. - Hello, I'm Bill Gates. - Here in the United
States, the qwerty keyboard was a very natural tool. We were able to use our
alphabet and our symbols that we all are very used to, to develop programming languages so that we can make software. And soon, more and more
computers were showing up into American homes. (pop songs from the '80s) - [Narrator] The Commodore
64 now in a family pack. - Meanwhile on the other
side of the planet, China, a country of
almost a billion people only had 3000 computers
in the entire country. They were so far behind the West when it came to computer literacy. The Chinese government
begins to freak out. And it's like, guys we're
getting absolutely destroyed by the West because of
this whole computer thing, and you're telling me that
is because we can't fit our language onto this keyboard? Are you kidding me? What
we're gonna do about it? So the Chinese government
made this a huge priority. And they finally started to
develop somethings that worked. (door opening) - I got it. (audience laughing) - The first major system of
typing used the qwerty keyboard to build the shape of the characters. - We call it Cangjie. - Cangjie, and it was
pretty darn complicated. - It's basically like, puzzles. - Like Legos. - Yeah, kind of, like a brick.
You just put them together. I can write basic characters using that. - The system was clever
but it was complicated and not very fast at first. Luckily, China had a
wild card up its sleeve that will help get Chinese speakers typing on a qwerty keyboard. It had to do with this guy, Chairman Mao. - [Narrator] The great
Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong. - History time, here we go. - [Narrator] The Communist
Party's propaganda machine portrays the Chairman's Great Leap Forward as a dazzling success. - Mao was really bullish
about modernizing China. And one of his pet project was scrapping the entire Chinese character
system and replacing it with a Western-style alphabet
that sounds out Chinese words, sort of like how we sound out our English or Italian or Spanish words. Now it was like learning
thousands of Chinese characters is hard and complicated so
why don't we just have a Latin or Romanized alphabet like
the rest of the world. So by 1949, Mao was like ready
to roll, scrapping the entire Chinese writing system in
the name of a Roman alphabet. But then, one of its close buddies, former Communist dictator
Joseph Stalin, convinced Mao not to totally kill off
the Chinese characters. Stalin was like, dude, don't,
dude you're gonna regret it. And Mao was like, fine. So he kept the Chinese characters
as the main writing system but for teaching literacy in
school, he developed a written alphabet called pinyin. - Pinyin, P-I-N-Y-I-N. - Where you can use the Roman letters to spell out Chinese words
by the way that they sound. So right now you're
typing out this sentence in Romanized charcters in the way that it would be
phonetically spelt in Roman, like "wo" is W-O, right? - Yes. - Okay. So you typed it all out, - Yeah. - and down there it renders it, okay. Wow. So now if you want to
write the word "beef", which is "niu-rou". - How to say "beef"? - I think "niu-rou". - "NIU-ROU" - I've no idea, "niu-rou", "niu". - "NIU-ROU" - "R-rao, niu-rao". I've no idea. Instead of memorizing these
characters which means "beef", you can just spell it
out by the way it sounds. This romanization of Chinese,
again it's called pinyin would become really helpful years later when the Chinese government
is trying to figure out how to get people to type
on Western computers. But wait a minute. We can't go on before we mention a little bit of geopolitics. (canon firing) Okay, it's 1940s. Mao and his Communist
revolutionaries are taking over mainland China in a bloody
revolution and civil war. And the Chinese government
that they overthrow and are fighting with, end
up losing and retreating to an island nearby called
Taiwan to continue with their non-Communist version of China. And they both think that
they're the real China and they start this war
that has never stopped and they're still fighting this war and they both think they're China. Anyway, that's absolutely
a story I want to tell but I'm not going there. Now again blinders, we're
talking about qwerty keyboards. - If we're trying to figure something out, now we need to focus, okay? - So you have this "two
Chinas", the Communist one, and the non-Communist one. Mao is pushing the Romanized alphabet in the Communist version of China. And Taiwan is like, no, this
Romanized pinyin thing is an invention of the Communist
Party, and a total sell-out of the Chinese traditional
writing system, no way. But Taiwan is secretly like, we loved the idea of
having an alphabet for our Chinese language because it made it a lot
easier to teach literacy. So they adopted an alphabet,
but it's not the pinyin, Romanized alphabet. It is an old alphabetic
system that was developed in the early 1900s. - It's zhuyin. They did it before pinyin. They're completely
newly-invented a set of symbols for this purpose. - Wow. That is wild. So because they hated
their Communist enemies, Taiwan rejected the Romanized
alphabet that Mao was pushing and stuck with this traditional alphabet that had been developed
a few years earlier. And that's still how it is today. (woman speaking Chinese) So this gets to a pretty
satisfying answer to the question of this entire video which is how do Chinese speakers
type on a qwerty keyboard. The answer is, if you go to mainland China you're going to see keyboards like this. People in mainland China use
this keyboard to type out the sounds of their words,
and the computer takes that and renders it into Chinese characters. If you live in Taiwan,
you'll see a keyboard that looks more like this, but you basically do the same thing. Use these characters to type
out the sounds of the word and the computer will render
it into a Chinese character. Both of these are new writing systems that were developed in the past 100 years to help Chinese speakers
spell out their words and move away from a
character-based system. - [Narrator] Now what are the key features that you think should
be in an ideal laptop. - [Woman] Standby for the
software transmission. Better start your recorder now. - Okay, back to our timeline here. It's the '80s and '90s. China
is starting to really adopt technology and they're
using these typing methods to use the qwerty keyboards
to actually participate in the computing world. But they're still lagging so
far behind the Western world. They're way slower in their
typing so the Chinese government went back to the drawing
boards and was like, how can we make it faster. And boy, they found a solution in the '80s that will change everything. (woman speaking Chinese) And this is the work that's
kind of juicy, in my opinion. This is the part that
is like, I don't know, really helps me to understand
how people type today. You know when you go to Google and you start typing a sentence, and it fills out the rest
of the sentence for you, or even on Gmail these
days, like I'll be typing and suddenly it'll like
predict what I want to say. It's pretty cool. It's not life-changing. It's sort of like saves
me maybe a couple of milliseconds every day. In China, this technology
of predictive text, predictive typing, was life-changing because regardless of what method you use to start building your
characters in the computer, the computer now starts to guess what characters you want to type. For example, let's say someone
is using one of these systems that we're gonna use to
build these characters, and they type this character. This is the root of a Chinese
word and it means "water". The computer sees this and says, okay, you just typed "water". There's a bunch of
characters that are derived from this root, this "water" root. For example, here's the one for "river" or maybe you actually want this one which is the word for "wash". So if you just type water,
you can look at these options and decide which one you want. This was an algorithmic,
predictive typing system that was happening in
the late 1980s in China, three whole decades
before anything similar surfaced in the West. And it is this technology
of predictive text that changed everything for China. - [Narrator] Before computers,
there was no practical way to type the thousands of
characters called kanji. To deal with the complexity
of these symbol words different systems have been adopted. - They started to refine
this algorithm to make it more and more clear that
as soon as you start typing anything, the algorithm says, do you want to do this,
or this, or this, or this? I mean I've been watching a
great deal of competitions, typing competitions. (woman speaking Chinese) This is the thing in China, and if you zoom in and look
closely at this competition, you'll see that as soon as
these competitors start typing a pop-up box comes up, giving them an algorithmically
generated menu of options that predicts what they're trying to type. So typing in Chinese is as
much about choosing from this predictive menu as it
is about pressing the keys. It is a combination of both. And this competition has
pushed developers to make better and better predictive algorithms so that people can
communicate very efficiently using the keyboard. So how fast are these
people typing right now? Well, the average English
speaker can type at around 43 words per minute. I work on a computer all day
so I'm probably more like 60, 65 words per minute. There is an English typing
competition in Las Vegas and the typists here are
mind-blowing 163 words per minute. But if you head back to these
guys, these people are typing at a score of 242 words per minute, four times faster than I can type, and almost double what
they're typing in English at the best competition in Las Vegas. Whoa! - Wow, that's fast. - Yeah, it's fast. - So China used this technology that was developed in the West mainly designed for languages that are very different than Chinese, and they mastered it, but guess what? The Chinese government still
has the need for speed. They're like, how can we make it faster? So predictive typing in China
went from letting you start a character and predicting what character you want to choose, to then going to seeing
what character you just put and predicting the next one, the next word in the sentence
that you want to say. And now in the last few years they're pushing it to the next level, which is Cloud-based predictive texting. - A cloud? - Again, the closest thing
we have in the West is like the Google Auto-complete. You go to this search engine. You start typing and the Internet is like, a lot of people are searching this so we think you're searching this, too. But imagine, instead of
just a search engine, imagine this concept for everywhere. As you're typing your WORD documents, as you're texting your mom, anywhere in the digital
space that is connected to the Internet is now
feeding you sentences that they think maybe you want to say based on an AI-generated
web of information of what everyone else is texting,
and emailing and writing. So an example of this, let's say that there's
a Chinese movie star that just got into a big car accident. It's all over the news and
everybody is talking about it. You've never typed this
movie star's name before but as soon as you do start typing it your phone starts talking to the Cloud and not just the Internet but
other people's text messages. So then the algorithm says that I think you probably want to text
about this movie star and the car accident. And this seems like a great
time-saving technology that helps Chinese speakers type. - It's a good idea. - But just imagine some scenarios here. Let's say that you're not writing about a movie star and the car accident. But let's say instead you
are texting a friend about June 4th 1989, Tiananmen Square. - [Narrator] The noise of gunfire rose from all over the center of Peking. - [Narrator] China is a
nation at war with itself. - There's one major company
that owns the software. This one company determines most of what shows up in predictive text. And in a country where there's
not a lot of hesitation to control citizens'
access to information, it's not far-stretched to
see how subtle manipulation can start to occur with
this Cloud-predictive text. Algorithm deciding sort
of what should go next. For example, if you type
in "Taiwan is China", the algorithm will suggest to you "Taiwan is an inseparable part of China". Anyway, this is not a
major problem right now. And I'm not saying that the
government is manipulating every individual in China
with predictive text. All I'm saying is that, the
story of how Chinese speakers have been able to type
on the qwerty keyboard is the story of really clever and amazing technological advancements, and a huge part of that has
been predictive algorithms. And all I'm saying is that
algorithmically presented information can lead to
some dangerous outcomes in terms of making people
think a certain way. But at the end of the day, let
us just end on the fact that China has developed a
really amazing technology for getting their language
into the computer, and by doing so, have been able to pass
any typist in the West, helping fuel the rise of China as a technological powerhouse. (mysterious music) That's the story here and
I really learned a lot. Thank you all for watching.
I will see you soon. And thanks for being here.
The topic is probably intereating but Harris is straight up an insufferable propagandist
Johnny does a lot of lies of omissions in his videos which annoys me in never ending ways
This dude is a known propagandist. Pay him no attention.
The person who made the video above seemed to have lifted almost all of his info from this dude on this video.
https://youtu.be/Ow49P0Qk2_o
Except people have been romanizing the Chinese language for centuries. One look at Wikipedia shows this history was false. Saying Chairman Mao did it and the story with Stalin is ridiculousβ¦.
It erases the work of many Chinese linguists/intellectuals on this and makes it seem like some dictatorβs crazy idea, rather than a huge innovation.
The explanation or the ideas behind the scene is way off. Predictive typing is a very inefficient way of typing, it only helps normal people in daily use. For professionals like court reporters, they probably use "wubi" or similar, which is a unique encoding system to match over 6k characters with certain rules(usually based on character root and stroke) in minimum entropy. If you are familiar with computer science, it's more like a hash function.
Anyway it's another vox piece, what else can you expect. They just wrap old concepts into new bottles with fancy media techniques.
Some of this info is so far off. Bopomofo and Pinyin go back way before the civil war. Same for romanizing written Chinese. I dont think Mao could have ever seriously considered it for longer than 5 seconds because Chinese intellectuals long before him came to the consensus that homophones were too big of a problem.
This is a pretty basic video. It's ok. It neglects to point out another probably pretty major reason Chinese people can type or text so fast nowadays (I know cuz I do it myself and I've sneaked glances at many a Chinese phones during my travels lol).
Yes you could text out "xie xie" for θ°’θ°’ thank you. You know what's even better? Just type "x x". I don't have to type out "zhong hua ren min gong he guo" for the full name of the PRC. I just have to type "zhrmghg". Of course this way has limits, and I huff with exasperation with the seconds I lose when the algorithm doesn't put the "y y" I'm looking for at the front of the queue and I have to scroll over to find the "y y" I'm looking for, but I would argue this is a major reason Chinese people can type so fast.
Pinyin is actually quite a beautiful and elegant system (not the biggest fan of its usage for the Uygur language however), and combined with the typing system, it makes the typing of Chinese very easy and quick. Chinese already has a reputation for being succinct and compact (Chinese translations at the UN are almost invariably the shortest translations requiring the fewest pages), and now they have speed as well.
Algorithm is true though. If you use Sogou keyboard on your phone (doesn't work as well with the Apple or Google keyboards for obvious reasons), your keyboard's algorithm adapts with the times. Obviously, before Dingzhen became China's heartthrob, you couldn't simply type "dz" for δΈη the way you can now. The Apple and Google keyboards still learn from you (and I think Apple with its big consumer base in China still offers some machine learning), but Sogou pulls from a much wider world, among other nifty features (like pulling memes, stickers, and gifs for you).
Side Note: Uygur and Tibetan also conform to QWERTY the best they can, using pinyin principles. So Ϊ, which in most Western transliterations would be written as ch, is on the q key for Uygur, because q in pinyin is a ch sound. Another example is Ψ΄, which in the West is usually sh, but in on the Uygur keyboard is x, because x in pinyin is like sh. I think Mongolian traditional script keyboard also conforms to QWERTY closely, but that's one alphabet I haven't been able to learn too well.
Final note: QWERTY is itself a wreck in my opinion when compared to the Russian keyboard. Russian puts the major vowels "a" and "o" where you rest your index fingers. Other more commonly used letters are near the center, less commonly used letters at the periphery. I also think I rather like the Korean keyboard in that consonants are on one side, vowels on the other.
But QWERTY has conquered the world so whatever.
This guy is a paid actor. This video on Covid virus subconsciously change people's point of view that the virus could have leaked from Wuhan lab.