Doesn't Chinese input usually work by typing Latin codes for characters? Korean characters represent syllables made up of shapes representing individual sounds, those fit on a keyboard just fine. And I'm not sure about Japanese, there they may use something like spell checkers to map kana to kanji.

Another interesting challenge with CJK languages was just displaying them. You need higher-resolution graphics and a much bigger character ROM to even consider that.

Romanization systems for Chinese vary, but all have the issue that a single "word" in the romanized system can map to dozens, if not hundreds, of actual "words" in the target language.

Pinyin is sort of the standard for romanization, although other systems exist, as well as inputs that aren't based on romanization (bopomofo).

Take the pinyin `fei`. Just looking at the tones that can be on this word, it can mean at least 4 words (my dictionary app couldn't find any neutral tone words). In reality, its at least dozens, each with different contextual meanings.

This is a history Chinese keyboards before word processors, and even as they were first introduced: https://spectrum.ieee.org/chinese-keyboard

Very interesting! It was certainly a different technological challenge...

Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40537464

IIUC there are ambiguity problems in Chinese and Korean, just less than there are for Japanese. Korean input has no end-of-character marks and multi-character entry could be split different ways, Chinese has bunch of homonyms-in-Latin, and Japanese is a huge mess(like always, if I think about it...)