Ever wondered what typewriters were like in China?

Please excuse any mistakes in the translation. Neither of the languages is my native one. :)

"In China you don't have letters when writing. Instead you use characters, and each character is a word. In China there are up to 53.000 different characters, but you can get by well knowing 2.000. A Chinese typewriter is, as you can see, not like our typewriters. It reminds one of a big toy printing press. On this plate, there are 2.500 different characters, which are lifted with a magnet. The character quickly passes a little roller with ink, and is then stamped on the paper roughly like on a regular typewriter.

Here, Chosen Hong (sp?) is searching for the characters. All the characters are very small, and are arranged in a certain system, so you can find them quickly. All the characters that have to do with water, for instance, are arranged in one row, and so on. You take care not to turn the machine over, lest all the characters fall out. If that happens, you'll be spending days sorting them correctly again.

Sometimes, a character is missing from the machine. In that case, you first have to find the character in a catalogue. Then you pick up the character you're searching for from a box you have nearby.

Chosen Hong himself says he's not that good at writing using a typewriter. He writes much quicker with a pen. And here he begins by writing: "this is a Chinese typewriter". In China, children don't write with letters, rather, they use characters."

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