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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Just a side note regarding typing in Chinese:
Many use Cangjie, which is where you type the word by typing the smaller character blocks that “build” a character, or Pinyin, where you type out the sound of a character and let autocorrect pick the character for you. In Taiwan (and I think only recent generations?) we also use Zhuyin, which isn’t unlike the alphabet in that we spell out the sound of characters with Zhuyin characters. Using Pinyin and Zhuyin we no longer need to know all the characters to type; the sound is enough.
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