The Chinese language is more than 5,000 years old and used today by more than a billion people. Not suprisingly, there is a lot of interest by English-speakers in learning Chinese.
The language has more than 4,000 pictographic characters. When compared to Japanese, this is more than the 1,945 standard kanji characters (borrowed from Chinese during the Heian period), but fortunately each character has only a single oral reading.
This page provides links to online resources related to Westerners trying to learn or use Chinese. Other related web pages:
The definitive English-language technical book on displaying Chinese, Japanese and Korean on computers is given by Ken Lunde, so you should see his books and web sites.
North American residents can use ChinaSoftware.com, which sells all forms of Chinese language software for delivery here, both for users who have Chinese language software installed, and for those who are running regular English systems.
Macintosh users with Mac OS 9 are ready to enter and display Chinese characters in both traditional and simplified Chinese. You just need to use the “Custom Install” option when you install Mac OS 9, or you need to re-run the installer and select “Custom Install” to find the various Language Kits.
Both the simplified and traditional Chinese language kits with OS 9 includes an optional “Show English Menu” on the input menu.
Mac OS X 1.0 (“10.0”) includes fonts for viewing simplified Chinese (such as in a web browser), but not for entering Chinese text.
Other (perhaps less useful) web pages:
As with Japanese, TwinBridge allows input of Chinese characters on English language Windows machines. See the Chinese computing FAQ at U.C. Davis.