Typing Chinese characters on iPad keyboard

Settings>General>Keyboard>International Keyboards

Select the ones you want to have access to. A button will appear on your keyboard that will allow you to quickly switch between languages on the keyboard.

How can I type Chinese using the iPad keyboard and how to switch between English and Chinese?

Please read p. 19-20 of the iPad User Guide.

Note that the iPad does not yet support Traditional Chinese input, only Simplified Chinese.

I think that it should change to match the current keyboard language you are using on the iPad (my original post). I don't have my bluetooth keyboard with me to test, but I imagine it does. Otherwise people that don't speak or understand english would need a specialized bluetooth keyboard to use their native language on the iPad.

I'm referring the Keyboard dock, not the built-in keyboard on iPad.

You still need to use the Settings to select the Chinese keyboard layout. There is a separate section for hardware keyboards, where you can further choose us, french, german (depending on whether your physical keyboard is qwerty, azerty, or qwertz).

Are you having some problem after doing that? Are you familiar with how normal pinyin input works?

PS I'm not sure whether there is a physical keyboard shortcut for switching languages, but you may be able to do English while in Chinese via Caps Lock.

Idea, apple should put the fn key to use there and allow it to toggle international keyboards if used in combination with another key.

What app are you trying to use this with?

@anyone is it possible that the app, if not one from apple, might not support another language?

Can you explain what is happening exactly? If you type "zhong" are there lines underneath? What happens if you hit space? Do you get a menu with a choice of characters? What happens if you hit return?

Only the alphabets appear, nothing else.

Are you sure that caps lock is turned off?

Does the onscreen virtual keyboard work correctly for Chinese when you switch to it (there is a special key to do that)?

You might ask also in the Chinese Mac group, in case someone there has been using the dock keyboard for Chinese:

http://groups.google.com/group/chinesemac/