2018-05-31 20:40:17

Hi folks,
I have one question primarily for people actively speaking or studying Chinese language. I was wondering, why there isn't a simple mechanical keyboard to type chinese characters simply with theyr names and tone marks, quickly and efficiently.
today, after I teached Kubo (my speech synthesiser) to interpret pinyin correctly, I found out an answer. It is because one pronounced character can have more written forms, from which each has a different meaning.
For example ta1 means he, as well as she and it. All of these are wrote differently, but spoken the same.
So I am wondering now how can blind person handle this? Sighted users have keyboards, where they can choose which character to use while writing, but this is useless for us, because chinese speech synthesisers will make no difference between he and she like real speaker even if we have opportunity to choose from a list.
May be there is a braille keyboard with support of chinese characters? But if yes, how does it look? Because even eight point braille notation is not suitable, it can represent only 256 characters, what is not enough for chinese's 7000.

Thanks.

Greetings

Rastislav

2018-06-10 02:08:04

Not as you think
The screen reader will try to compose words with your chosen characters. You can judge the characters you want through different words.
for example ta(他);
The screen reader will try to compose words for the character ta
for example 女性的她(feamail she)和男性的他(mail he), or 塔防的塔(Tower Defense)
Based on the words that different characters can form, you can easily determine which character you want.
Every character in Chinese has four tones, However, there are only two tones in English.
According to the change of pitch can also help you determine what character to choose.
Of course, if you don’t have a concept of Chinese, you may not understand what I’m talking about.

about How Braille is Realized in Chinese
For braille, there is only pitch change, there is no stroke between characters and characters
In other words, as long as you can read the sentences smoothly, because I said, every character in Chinese has four tones.
So, as long as you can distinguish between the four tones, reading braille is not a problem, because braille does not have the problem of different strokes between different characters.

2018-06-10 03:29:43

We have tones in English? I never knew. And no I'm not being a smart ass I literally didn't know, how does that work?

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2018-06-10 05:00:04

That's a google translate mistake... we don't have tones. We have pitches, and emphasis.

As to Chnese, yes, speech synthesizers will actually read characters with their proper tones. In Windows 10, if using core voices, characters will be read out as you scroll over them with their meaning, and examples. In microsoft pinyin, if you write ta, the list of characters will come up for you to pick... and one correction. The ta character that refers to the third person only refers to a person, because there is no word for he or she in Chinese. Ta simply means that person, so there is only one character for that word with that pronunciation.

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