text: how do people in china type? they have like 1600 characters so how do they type in word or something similar? we type in pin-yin.   for example, me in chinese sounds like woa in english but it is written as wo in chinese pinyin. so we type wo and all wo's pop up and we select the right wo. pin-yin is a english-like version of chinese where the word is expressed in alphabet form and not traditional calligrphies.  edit: @ jdmc fyi, we do type with english letters not chinese special keyboards.