Internet in China questions..

[伏藏龙]

Hey forum,

I'm new here.. I've decided to learn Chinese and am very excited about it, the forum looks like a great resource.

I was just wondering today about the Internet in China.. Specifically, in China how do you search websites? For example if not writing in English how do you write Chinese on the computer? Also all the domain extensions like. com or even. cn are English so I was curious as to how most Chinese people search for websites and type in domains do they use Chinese characters or just use English letters?

Thanks

[Demonic_Duck]

Most people in mainland China use some form of pinyin IME (input method editor). There are various ones available, souku and google pinyin are two popular ones. Once you have one set up, it's fairly simple to switch between different input languages - the default keyboard shortcut on windows computers is alt+shift. Many people are too lazy to even do that and just leave it on their pinyin IME but switching to latin alphabet input mode, which can be activated in many IMEs by simply pressing the shift key.

 

If you don't want to install anything yet, google translate already has a stripped-down version of google pinyin built in - just set the "from" language to Chinese, and click the "拼" button at the bottom left corner of the input box. In fact, there are also other options available from the drop-down menu (wubi, zhuyin, cangjie, handwriting etc.) so you can see a sample of the alternative available input methods

[Yorin]

While it's technically possible to use Chinese characters in URLs, and some domain names like .中国 seem to exist, they don't seem to be widely used. Chinese websites usually use the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals for URLs.