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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A Chinese character is the smallest unit of the language which has a meaning and a pronunciation. A character is still made up of one or more sub components but as part of the written language they do not exist as an individual unit except in limited circumstances where we have to talk about and describe a character itself.
A word in Chinese is made of one or more characters, in this sense a character is closer to a syllable in English, but understanding Chinese with reference to English is not really the way to go, it is better to understand Chinese on its own terms.
So a character can be a word, eg 马 means horse as others wrote. Does this mean “a character represents a whole word or concept”? Not really, no more so than a word in English “represents a whole word or concept” IMO.
Words in Chinese are often / usually made of two characters, or more. So fire (火) + vehicle (车) = train (火车). And fire (火) + chicken (鸡) = turkey (火鸡). So while knowing characters that make up a word is useful to understanding the word, it’s not a completely useful system for understanding Chinese.
The examples above are both cases of two characters making up a word, which is distinct from a single character made up of two components. Understanding the latter is an even less precise exercise, because the resultant character often takes part of the meaning and part of the pronunciation from the subcomponents, eg fire (火 huo) + few (少shao) = stir fry (chao炒). Note the pronunciation doesn’t match, you don’t know which part gave the pronunciation, and the writing got squashed so if you don’t know Chinese you may not even recognise the components.
If you come across a character you never saw before, you should typically look it up in a dictionary, inferring from context is not reliable.
There are tens of thousands of characters and I don’t know but I guess any educated Chinese person knows over ten thousand. But remember, words are made of characters, so you may know the characters and still not know the word, so reading a Chinese newspaper based on knowing 3000 characters is a very hard task, and I doubt anyone learning Chinese can read a newspaper on the day they learned their 3000th character. There is no definitive list so no one really knows all characters, you could easily hypothesise finding a lost book of Confucius which contained a character no one saw before and thus having to learn it.
Chinese is full of homonyms, others touched on this but it’s not really in your question. Since Chinese is a tonal language, homonyms can be a match on pronunciation and tone or just pronunciation. There are probably over 40 characters pronounced shi, and someone wrote a poem using only these characters, but they are distributed across the 4 or 5 tones so you can get a sense of how many are exact vs inexact matches.
Typing, people usually use pinyin, i.e you type huo and it pops up a list sorted by frequency. Or better you type huoche and up pops train, you can click it. There is also handwriting input, almost no one uses this, although I personally do, as a learning aid, because I like being able to read and write Chinese characters (my Chinese is rubbish though). Pinyin was invented for Chinese kids to learn the language, but it is heavily used by foreign learners of Chinese too, some the the extent of being illiterate despite speaking fluently.
I think that covers all that you actually asked let us know if anything else.
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