deskthority

This has probably come up here on DT before, but my Google-fu is too weak to find it. Anyway: If all goes as planned, I'll start taking a basic course in standard (putonghua) Chinese this autumn. I'll probably only need to write stuff by hand of the actual course, but it would be fun to learn how to type chinese characters on the computer as well. Seeing how I can not even touch type properly in my primary language, I'll probably need keycaps with some kind of legends . I know one can get keycap stickers, but I'm not that keen on that solution.

As far as I can tell, one basically uses either a phonetic input system or one based on shapes. But I have no idea which system would be the best to start with, or – more importantly – how one would go about finding keysets for a mechanical keyboard. What I've turned up so far is more or less that there are rubberdome keyboards on places like Alien Express, but no mechanical ones and no keysets. But I get the feeling that I'm just looking in the wrong places – I'm not even sure I'm using the right search terms. Figured someone here might be able to point me in the right direction.

http://www.inpad.com.tw/goods.php?catId=404

If you're learning Mandarin Chinese using the Pinyin system, you don't really need to purchase dedicated Chinese key buttons. If you're learning via Bopomofo, then you probably do for the first few months, just to remind yourself where the Bopomofo symbols are; after that, you just memorize where each of them are and do touch typing. I learned keying Chinese in Bopomofo, but now I use regular English-only keyboards anyway.

Thanks for the advice! Seeing as how I'm probably quite a few months away from knowing enough being able to order anything from a web store entirely in Chinese, I guess I'll settle for Pinyin.