Sorry for the ignorant question, but how do kids growing up in China learn to read and write Chinese? Aren’t there thousands of characters, with each one representing a whole word or concept? Do students learn every one? And if you come across one while reading that you don’t know is there any way to figure out what it means from the symbol directly or do you have to just figure it out from the context?
And then how do people type in Chinese? I assume that like scrolling through thousands of characters to input a specific one would be waaaaay too time consuming…?
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Chinese is my second language so I can’t speak to how kids learn growing up, but I can talk to how to type Chinese. There are two methods i know of. I, personally, use pinyin to type on the characters. Pinyin is just like the english spelling of a character. You first type the pinyin, then you will be given a small selection of characters. Sometimes the computer will be able to put in the character for you if given enough context. I have an example: I type in 马 (ma) which means horse. “Ma” is what i type, the i am presented “马，吗， 麻”. I selected the first one since i wanted to say horse. Hopefully this helped a little.
Children are taught to recognize individual characters, starting with very common words and moving on to less common ones. They memorize the symbols, just as though they were words they were learning.
Like words in English are made up of letters, characters in Chinese are made up of different components. For example, the character 晴 is made up of and 日 and 青, which can be split further into 龶 and 月.
Usually, one half of the character gives is a “semantic” comoponent and contributes to the meaning of the character (日=’sun’, 晴 = ‘sunny/good weather’), while the other gives the character its pronunciation (in Mandarin, 青 = ‘qīng’, 晴 = ‘qíng’).
Because Chinese characters are quite complex, it is difficult to come up with a system where you can type them with a keyboard. Thus just typing them using their pronunciation is quite popular.
Oversimplification.
Every word is it’s own drawing/symbol
Next complication level. You can combine some symbols to form a new word
1. Unlike alphabet languages, you can’t learn to pronounce chinese symbols without being taught.
2. No way of knowing. You can guess from context, but that’s never guaranteed
3. You need to learn 1000 – 2000 characters to read a newspaper
4. Typing in chinese is romanising the sounds. Like typing ‘ma’ gives me a couple of options, and you pick from that. It gets easier with practice.
Yes learning mandarin as is tedious. Repetition repetition. Reps reps reps.
In Chinese Children start by learning the basic radicals, the simple symbols (man, woman, horse, I, you, etc.) Then they learn more complex symbols (woman+child=good, woman+horse=mother, etc.) As for typing, there are keyboards that use radicals and common symbols, but also they can type using pinyin (the romanized form of Chinese) so they would type “wo” and it would change to the symbol for “self/I”
It’s not as different from English as you think.
As a child you were probably taught phonics: you spelled out each individual word letter by letter and combined those letters to find the meaning.
But you’ll notice that as you are reading this paragraph, you aren’t using phonics. You maybe use phonics on the rare occasion where you see an unfamiliar word, but 99.99% of the words you read now, you know instantly because you’ve memorized the shape of them. I could take the word ‘shape’ and change the font, blow it up 3000%, change the color, etc. and its meaning would still instantly pop into your head because you’ve seen it hundreds of times. That’s how Chinese speakers read the characters.
The most complicated Chinese characters are made up of small pieces called ‘radicals’. Chinese dictionaries are sorted by radical so you can search for an unknown character by its constituent parts to look up the meaning. Nowadays everyone has phone apps where they draw the character on their screen with a finger and it pops up.
> Aren’t there thousands of characters, with each one representing a whole word or concept? Do students learn every one?
There are thousands of characters in Chinese, but in day-to-day life you really don’t need to learn that many characters. It’s estimated that you only need to know the 2000-3000 most common characters to read a Chinese newspaper and understand everything. It’s just like there are thousands upon thousands of words in an English dictionary, but most people get by in life without knowing many of those words.
Also, most “words” in Chinese are represented by a few characters, usually two or three. You can think of it like simpler characters coming together to form a “compound” word. For example, computer in Chinese translates to 电脑, which contains the character for electricity (电) and the character for brain (脑).
> And if you come across one while reading that you don’t know is there any way to figure out what it means from the symbol directly or do you have to just figure it out from the context?
Like if you come across an English word you don’t know, you can figure it out from context or you can look it up in a dictionary (or these days you would probably just use an app).
English words you are usually able to sound out from their spelling, which helps if you’ve heard a word and just haven’t read it before. With Chinese characters, you are not guaranteed to be able to guess the sound of the character, but often you can just like in English. This is because most Chinese characters are actually “compound” characters, comprised of one half (the radical) that conveys meaning, and one half that coveys the sound of the word.
For example, 马 is the Chinese character meaning horse, and is pronounced “Ma”. 妈 is the Chinese character meaning mom, and is also pronounced “Ma”. You can see that 妈 contains the character 马 in it, as well as the character 女, which is the Chinese character meaning woman. In essence, the character 妈 is built from two parts. It means something related to woman (女) and it sounds similar to the character for horse (马). If you somehow didn’t know what the character 妈 meant, you would likely be able to guess from these context clues.
> And then how do people type in Chinese? I assume that like scrolling through thousands of characters to input a specific one would be waaaaay too time consuming…?
You type the pinyin (the phoenetic representation) of the word or phrase you want and the software will fill in the most commonly used word or phrase that matches. It’s sort of like an AI trying to predict what you mean. If you want to say an uncommon character, there is a drop down menu that lets you select alternate meanings. Typing in Chinese can actually be pretty quick, because Chinese characters convey information more densely than English letters, and you can often type shortened versions of the most common phrases and the software will still be able to predict you. For example, if you wanted to say hello, you may just need to type “nh” and because that’s such a common phrase the software will identify it correctly as 你好 (Ni hao).
Children are taught basic characters first then slowly progress with more difficult characters as they grow older (like how you would with other languages). Usually they learn the characters through rote memorisation and repeatedly writing the same word over and over again. Typically you don’t learn every single characters (like how you don’t need to know every single words of English). I think to be able to read most things you’ll need about 2000 – 3000 characters out of the tens of thousands there are.
As for the typing, there are several ways but the one I prefer is through 拼音(pinyin). Pinyin is like Chinese but written in ABCs based on their pronunciation. So to write something e.g. “Big” , I’d type how it sounds onto the keyboard “da”. Then a list of words that sounds the same would show up like 打，大，哒 (the more commonly used ones will show op first) so I’d select that.
There is also handwriting where you just write the characters on your phone.
There are also other ways of typing like using the “radicals” (components that make up a Chinese characters). I’m not well verse in this method at all so I might be wrong, but basically you put the components together like a puzzle. If I want to write 好，then I’ll first choose the 女 then a list would popup and then I’ll choose 子 to make 好。
Hopefully I’ve answered most of your question. I’m typing on a phone rn so apologies if I missed anything or mistyped anything.
Adding on to what others have said the computer, and especially the smartphone, has really upended Chinese culture around language. Prior to the computers being widespread within the mass populace, it was seen as uneducated and low-class to not know how to write and read the popular 3000 characters, especially with poor penmanship. People’s social classes were often elicited from their ability to recognize and write complex/seldom used characters.
That has really changed now that most people very infrequently actually write Chinese by hand. Pinyin input on computers means people only need to know the sound the character makes and passing knowledge of how a character looks. The millennial generation and younger, while they can easily read the most common characters, often cannot write many of them, especially as they get further from the younger years of primary education. Not really a knock on them – there’s just significantly less usage for that kind of knowledge now, and instead a lot of that cognitive load and learning time of rote memorization in school has been spent elsewhere (coding, engineering, learning English, etc.) That’s a huge generational shift due to the computer.
You memorize. There’s no real way around symbolic languages. （Disclaimer: I didn’t grow up in China, and my chinese skills are terrible. But I grew up learning them as a second language)
If you come across a word while reading and you don’t know what it means or how to pronounce it, you can ‘guess’ based on the symbols on it. For example, you know the word 请 as ‘please’. But you encounter the word 情 which, for our example, is totally unfamiliar to you. You can deduce that because the first word is pronounced “qing”, the second word *could* (but not always) also be pronounced as ‘qing’ (if only having a different inflection/tone). You also recognize the left part of 情 as a root word symbolizing 心, meaning ‘heart’. So you can deduce it has something to do with heart or emotion. As it turns out, 情 means affection or love 爱情.
Sometimes, when people ask for clarification (esp during verbal communication), they ask “X as in XY?” For example, “I feel so numb” 我感觉很麻木。 Suppose you don’t know what the last words meant (pronounced ma-mu). The other person can say 麻辣的麻，木材的木。 （ma as in mala/numb-spicy, mu as in mucai/wood). This way, the person recognizes the other words, and can determine what the other person is trying to say.
It’s the reason why Chinese is so hard, because it’s a symbolic language rather than phonetic, and there’s just so many words. SO MANY WORDS. It rivals (or is probably only dwarfed by) Arabic as one of the hardest languages to learn.
EDIT:
To add, pinyin (and the earlier form of it, which is zhuyin) is a somewhat new-ish development (?) so many of the elderly chinese people don’t really know how to write/use it. Which is why you may notice them communicating to each other in short audio messages.
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