Because the Chinese language uses a logographic script—one in which one "character" corresponds roughly to one "word" or meaning—there are vastly more characters, or glyphs, than there are keys on a standard computer keyboard.
A variety of keyboard input method editors or IMEs have been designed to allow the input of Chinese characters using standard keyboards.
Keyboard input methods can be classified in three main types: by encoding, by pronunciation, and by structure of the characters. The following are just some samples of Chinese input methods. Many of those input methods have variations. Full Pinyin and Double Pinyin are variations of the Pinyin input method. In addition, the methods which require the user to select a character from a menu generally have sophisticated methods for guessing which characters the user intends based on context.
Different people are most comfortable with different methods and each standard has its strengths and weaknesses. For example, for someone who is already familiar with Pinyin, the Pinyin method can be learned most quickly. However, the maximum typing rate is limited, and learning the system is difficult. Wubi takes much effort to learn, but expert typists can enter text much faster than the phonetic methods. Because of these factors, there is no likelihood of a "standard" method evolving.
Other means of inputting Chinese characters are not widely used but include stylus and tablet, with hand-writing recognition software, as the most common alternative, and then OCR and voice recognition. As with the English language, all these methods suffer from high error rates, though the error rates are acceptable to many users.
Since the Chinese language uses a logographic script—that is a script where one or two "characters" corresponds roughly to one "word" or meaning—there are vastly more characters, or glyphs, than there are keys on a standard computer keyboard.
These, especially the latter two, are less frequently used than keyboard-based input methods and, as with even the most advanced English language systems, suffer from relatively high error rates, especially when used without proper “training”, though the error rates are an acceptable tradeoff to many users.
Particular mention should be given to hand-writing recognition systems: Although mostly associated with stylus- and tablet-based systems, it is in fact one of the built-in input methods in Windows XP systems.
To illustrate, in the X Window System, the facility to allow the input of Latin characters with diacritics is also called an input method.
The term input method generally refers to a particular way to use the keyboard to input a particular language, for example the Cangjie method, the pinyin method, or the use of dead keys.
On the other hand, the term input method editor generally refers to the actual program that allows an input method to be used (for example MS New Pinyin, PRIME, or SCIM), or the actual editing area that allows the user to do the input.
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