Here’s an answer to my question about putting Chinese into the blog. Not, mind you, that I really know Chinese to put in. But I do know how to use Babelfish. (Yes, you can translate into Chinese, and it’s probably as bizarre as a translation into Spanish or French–languages which I can read. But never mind.) But I also have the advantage of having two Chinese speakers in the office. Liz Steffey, my resolute assistant who is determinedly giving me lessons (and has promised me detention if I don’t do better tomorrow), and my son Tom, who is working as an intern. They both work on Guanxi: The China Letter. Here are the instructions posted by a kind friend, Qiang, in a comment on my last post:

“It’s easy to put Chinese characters into a blog if you are using Windows XP. Go to Control Panel/Regional and Language Options/Advanced, then select Chinese in the pull-down menu box. You will be given choices of various Chinese keyboard. The one that’s easiest to use is the PinYin Keyboard. Then you will be asked to set up a shortcut key to switch between PinYin Keyboard and US English Keyboard. Whenever you need to write a Chinese character in the midst of English writing, hit the shortcut key to switch keyboard, and then enter the correct PinYin, then switch back to English keyboard by hitting the shortcut key again.

“This may need some practice and expert supervision in the beginning. Then it gets easier and it’s fun.”

I tried this and still can’t figure it out. I chose “Chinese–PRC” as my option, but got a huge list of languages with some unchecked and a surprising number checked, Latin and Cyrillic and Greek. Which I don’t happen to need. But I didn’t find a simple PinYin keyboard option, or a way to set a shortcut. Hope to get more advice on this!

My computer does display Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, which many people’s computers do not. Friends have received messages with ??????? throughout, or sometimes many box symbols (sorry, I can’t find something in my symbols table to show you what this looks like, though you may see it when you read what I’m going to paste below). But when I open these e-mails on my PC they come through fine in the original characters. Of course I still can’t read them! But I usually have a colleague who does.

Here’s another question: Why write pinyin as PinYin? I notice that we tend to lower-case this word and other Chinese words, but I’ve seen more than one Chinese friend capitalize the syllables separately. Should we be doing this? Is every character a single syllable?

Finally, let’s try some characters. Here is my Chinese name: 沈凯伦(Shen Kai Lun). And here is 关系, guanxi. This is just cut-and-paste from Microsoft Word, and I have the characters handy now, thanks to Liz. She even has me learning to write my name. You’ll notice that I’m having trouble adjusting the font back to Normal–a problem to be solved another day!

Technorati : blogging, keyboard settings, learning Chinese, pinyin