I need someone to explain a chinese typewriter to me.

This looks like a job not for me.

not too sure how this one works, but generally chinese characters are made up of different parts.

but i think most people just use the sounds and type the words as they sound (using letters) into the computer, and the computer gives the user options of words to use.

This has boggled my mind as well, I can understand typing the sounds into a computer and have it give you options, but a typewriter?

That grey platform in the picture looks almost braille-ish... maybe you run some kind of feeler-cursor over a series of bumps or something?

craziness.

http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/chinlng2.html

scroll down for answr. more like printing press/linotype than typewriter...

Computers are way easier than typewriters to generate Chinese characters. I know at least from the Chinese characters I have studied in Japanese (and the way they are organized in a dictionary) that there are common parts shared by many, many words, called radicals, that index a large number of symbols in sets. Perhaps phonology could be used to a certain degree, as jellybean suggests, although what would they be typing to represent it since they don't have phonetic orthography, roman letters? Radicals would make the most sense, esp. since I think they are pretty widely known.