Testers
Chinese Keyboard Tester
Test every key on a Chinese keyboard and check your Pinyin or Zhuyin input method really produces characters. Covers Bopomofo caps and all five board sizes.
Reads real keydown/keyup events and what your input method produces. Everything stays in this tab — nothing you type is uploaded. Tab and Escape always keep their normal behaviour.
- Last key
- —press any key
- Presses
- 0
- Keys tested
- 0 / 104
- Chattering
- None
- Largest rollover
- 0 keys
Pinyin input test
Type nihao below and press space to pick a candidate. Working Pinyin turns it into 你好. If the letters stay letters, the board is fine and the input method is off.
Nothing typed yet.
IME composition check: no composition events yet. A Pinyin IME fires these while you pick a candidate.
Key log
Press any key to start.
Press every key and watch it register, then use the box underneath to check that your input method is genuinely converting what you type. Those are two different questions with two different answers, and a Chinese keyboard is unusual in that the second one is nearly always the one that matters.
Pinyin input test: the check most people actually need
If you are here because your keyboard "types English", start at the input box
rather than at the board. Type nihao and press space. A working Pinyin setup
opens a candidate list after the first letter or two and replaces the letters
with 你好 when you choose one; a keyboard with no active input method leaves
nihao sitting there as five Latin letters.
The verdict line under the box counts what actually arrived. It reports Chinese
characters as a proportion of everything you typed, and it counts the fullwidth
comma and full stop — ，and 。— as Chinese, because a Pinyin IME switches the
punctuation as well as the letters. Getting 你好， back is a complete pass, and
a test that flagged that comma as foreign would report a fault in a keyboard
that is working perfectly.
Three outcomes are worth naming. Chinese characters arriving means the whole chain works, from switch to input method. Only Latin letters arrived means the switches are fine and the IME is off — nothing on the keyboard needs fixing. Mixed output usually means a half-switched IME, most often one left in English punctuation mode or in half-width mode after a Shift press it read as a toggle.
IME composition check: proving an input method is running
The composition line under the input box reports something no other part of a browser will tell you. While an input method is converting your keystrokes, it holds the text in a buffer that is not committed to the box yet, and the browser announces that buffer opening and closing with its own events. If those events ever fire on this page, an input method is installed and running on this machine, whatever else may be misconfigured.
That distinction is useful when you are working out whether to reinstall something. Composition events firing plus Latin output means the IME is present but in English mode — a toggle, not an installation problem. No composition events at all, on a machine where you believe an IME is set up, points at the input source list in the operating system rather than at the keyboard.
Zhuyin keyboard layout: the board sold in Taiwan
Switch the Caps picker to Zhuyin 注音 and the keycaps change to Bopomofo. This is the standard Dai Chien arrangement, the one printed on essentially every keyboard sold in Taiwan: consonants and vowels laid out across the three letter rows, and the tone marks on the number row.
The tone marks are the part worth testing deliberately. Zhuyin needs a tone on almost every syllable, so the 3, 4, 6 and 7 keys carry far more weight than the digits do on a Latin board. Press each of them and confirm it lights up before you conclude that the input method is at fault — a dead tone key looks exactly like an IME producing wrong candidates.
Numpad test and the rest of the board
Everything the general keyboard tester does is here too. Choose the size that matches your board — full-size, tenkeyless, 75%, 65% or 60% — and work along each row rather than hunting for the key you already suspect. Keys that respond fill with colour; keys that stay pale never reached the browser at all.
If a numpad key does nothing, check Num Lock before anything else: with Num Lock off those keys send Home, End and the arrows rather than digits, which looks identical to a dead number pad in any application expecting numbers.
Hold three keys at once and watch whether all three stay lit. If one drops out, the keyboard's matrix is blocking that combination rather than anything on this page — a limitation of cheaper boards rather than a fault.
Questions
- Why is my Chinese keyboard typing English?
- Almost always because the input method is switched off rather than because anything is broken. A mainland Chinese keyboard is physically a US keyboard — the caps say Q, W, E, R — and the Chinese is produced by software called an input method editor, or IME, which watches the Latin letters you type and converts them. If the IME is off, or Windows and macOS have quietly switched the active input source back to English, every key does exactly what it is printed to do and you get letters. Use the Pinyin input test on this page to tell the two cases apart: type nihao into the box and press space. If 你好 appears, everything works. If nihao stays as nihao, the switches are fine and the input method needs turning on — Shift is the usual toggle for Microsoft Pinyin, and Ctrl+Space or Caps Lock on other setups.
- Do Chinese keyboards have Chinese characters on the keys?
- Mainland ones do not. Chinese has tens of thousands of characters and a keyboard has about a hundred keys, so there is no way to map the writing system onto caps the way an alphabet is mapped. What you buy in Beijing or Shanghai is a plain US ANSI keyboard, and Pinyin input does the conversion in software. Taiwan is the real exception: keyboards sold there print Bopomofo — the Zhuyin phonetic symbols ㄅㄆㄇㄈ — in a second colour beside the Latin letters, because Zhuyin input maps those symbols directly onto keys. Switch the Caps picker above to Zhuyin 注音 to see that board, and to check that the four tone-mark keys on the number row register.
- How do I know if my IME is installed and running?
- Watch the IME composition check line under the input box. When an input method is active, the browser fires a distinct set of events — compositionstart, compositionupdate and compositionend — while you type the Latin letters and before any character is committed. Nothing else in a browser reports this, and it is a genuinely positive signal: if those events fire, an IME is installed and running, whatever else may be wrong. If you type a whole word and no composition is ever reported, the operating system is passing your keystrokes through untouched and there is no active input method to convert them.
- Which keys should I check on a Zhuyin keyboard?
- The number row, more carefully than you would on a Latin board. Zhuyin puts four tone marks on the number row — the second tone on 6, the third on 3, the fourth on 4 and the neutral tone on 7 — and almost every syllable you type needs one of them. A dead 3 or 4 key on a US board is a mild annoyance; on a Zhuyin board it silently blocks a third of the syllables in the language, and it presents as your typing being wrong rather than as a broken key. Work along the number row first, confirm all four light up, then do the letters.
- Does this send what I type to a server?
- No. Every keystroke and every character your input method produces is read and counted inside this page, and none of it is uploaded. That matters more here than on most tools, because testing an input method means typing real words rather than tapping keys at random. The counts you see are computed in the tab you are looking at, and the all-time totals are kept in this browser's local storage, so clearing your browser data clears them. The site counts page views in aggregate, which the privacy page describes in full.
- Why does the tester show KeyQ when I press a key that produced a Chinese character?
- Because the board reports which physical switch moved, not what came out of it. Browsers expose two separate signals for a keystroke: event.code, the position of the switch on the board, and event.key, the character produced under the current layout and input method. The keyboard picture reads event.code so that it stays correct no matter what language you are typing in, which is exactly what you want when the question is whether a switch is dead. The Pinyin input test reads the other signal, which is why the page has both — one answers a hardware question and the other answers a software one.