Chinese - ... the language, not the food!

Due some reasons I came in contact with the Chinese language recently.
As is proper for a ongoing computer scientist, I approach this topic in a logical way:

First, some facts:

• 5,000 characters (symbols)
  
• 1.2 billion native speakers
• different dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese..)
• no grammar (reflections)
• 3 tenses (past, now, future) <--- worth a look! :)
• 1 Symbol = complete word or part of a sentence
• same phonetic, different meaning: Xing can refer to "OK" and "Sex" both
  

My first thought: Wow, 5k characters... how to type them??
So, a Chinese keyboard is a "normal" English one. They use this to type the phonetic spelling (latin alphabet) of the word they want to type and the software suggests several words that match with that pronunciation.
Ok, so some pratical thing:
How to install Chinese font input system on Ubuntu/linux (8.10)

• $ sudo apt-get install scim scim-chinese scim-config-socket ttf-arphic-bsmi00lp ttf-arphic-gbsn00lp ttf-arphic-gkai00mp ttf-arphic-bkai00mp scim-frontend-socket scim-gtk2-immodule scim-server-socket scim-tables-zh xfonts-intl-chinese xfonts-intl-chinese-big

• After finished installation, create/open ".xsession" in your Home-Directory ( $ nano .xsession)
  there:
  

scim -d
export XMODIFIERS=@im=scim
export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
gnome-session

• save/exit
• make this file executable:
  chmod +x .xsession
  
• Restart X-Server (Strg+Alt+Backspace)

Now you can enter the Chinese input system via strg+space at a text cursor position. Maybe you would like to change the input dialect:
after strg+space click the most left button in scim, choose chinese (simplified) and the last one.
Now you can use this function in most of the text processing applications like gedit und firefox (tested).

晚安! (Wan an = GN8)