Nciku, I know… I can’t pronounce it either, but don’t be put off. I found this site incredibly useful for a reference when learning mandarin chinese (汉语！). Today you’ll learn how to use Nciku to help you learn Mandarin Chinese and use your Mac to write Chinese characters.

(This lesson requires a reasonable knowledge of Chinese)

Type any pinyin, English word or Chinese character in and you’ll be presented with translations, stroke orders and even example sentences the phrase could be used in. Let’s try one…

Here we go, gongyixue (工艺学). Okay, so how can we use our newly found character? Better find out ‘>more‘.

Brilliant; we’re half way towards making a Chinese blog about technology and nciku has done all the work for us!

Buuuut wait…

Picture this, you’re writing your technology blog for the Chinese technology enthusiast. You know what 工艺学 means and you even now know that ‘diannao’ means computer in Chinese. Thing is, you don’t want to open up nciku then start copying and pasting every single time you want to write a character. Here’s where a little Mac magic comes in handy.

Go ahead and open up System Preferences; head to the Language & Text section and, while your at it, go to ‘Input Sources’.

You’ll now be able to see all the languages you can change to using your keyboard. For example, change all the positions of the keys of your British keyboard into the keys of a French keyboard, Bulgarian to French, Canadian to Belgian, any keyboard to any keyboard… You can even choose Dvorak (which we’ll talk about in a later article). For now, take baby steps and just choose ‘Chinese – Simplified’. This will automatically tick the box saying ‘Pinyin – Simplified’, and is exactly what you will need for writing in Chinese on your Mac.

Now just make sure the check box ‘Show Input menu in menu bar’ is checked and you can now open up Pages, Microsoft Word, your Email, your blogger blog.. whatever you may wish to use for writing in Chinese (bare in mind that this does not work for virtual machines).

In your menu bar at the top right of your screen you’ll now see a flag representing your current keyboard language. Click on the flag and you’ll get a list of the other keyboard inputs you selected earlier. Just click on Pinyin – Simplified.

And that is pretty much it; start typing pinyin and you’ll get the characters that match up to that pinyin. Just use your number keys or your arrow keys while pressing the space bar to select the correct one. Your only job left to do now is learn all that pinyin!