To achieve these steps, the team employed a principle similar to the "pictophonetic compounds" principle of Chinese. In 1977 the team released the first generation of the method that would later be named "Tsang-chieh". The team selected a set of less than 2,000 components to compose about 12,000 common characters. Each component is represented by a permutation of 1 to 3 of 26 "Chinese alphabets" (also called "radicals"). Each "alphabet" maps to a particular letter key on a standard QWERTY keyboard.