So, if the Chinese don’t have an alphabet and use only pictograms comprising of over 6500 characters, how do they type on a keyboard? Do they have really large keyboards with over 6500 keys or do they just say “Screw Mandarin” and type in English (which can’t be true because I’ve seen Chinese characters on webpages/spam emails)? Is there some kind of algorithmic key pressing magic that goes on in order to produce said characters?
Japanese is kind of similar. Although usually native speakers do not use an English keyboard. They use this:
Since Japanese has 5 vowels, each key here represents a consonant and can actually enter any of the 5 vowels by either tapping on it or flicking up, down, left or right on it. Once you’ve built the word you’re trying to write, you can tap on the auto suggested kanji or katakana or leave it as is in hiragana.
The exception is the bottom left and right keys which are for alternative consonants (I’m not sure the actual linguistic term) and punctuation which have fewer options but work similarly.
So if I’m writing the character for home, I’d flick the button toy he right of the emoji button left for い and then right for え. Once I have both hiragana characters, I just need to tap on the 家 character that appears above the keyboard.