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Comment on The Chinese typewriter from the 1930s

I know nothing about Chinese characters but you would have to think it’d be easier to break all the characters into basic elements and have a dictionary that told the user what elements to add.

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Stovetop@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Honzi/Hanzi/Kanji/whatever you want to call them are mostly made of base parts called radicals that form a whole, but the problem is that they are not the same size/position in different characters. For example, the character for lady 女 is squished to the left in the word for good 好 but squished to the bottom in peaceful 安 and squished to the top left in anger 怒.

And it’s not enough to say “why not just split those half character radicals into full characters and make compound terms” because while 好 means ‘good’, 女子 means ‘maiden’.

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- tsonfeir@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Seems inefficient.
  
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  - Stovetop@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Relevant username?
    
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