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…?
In: 303
I’m from Hong Kong. There’re a lot of good replies here regarding how Mainland Chinese type, though I’d like to shed some light on how we do it, since we use a completely different typing method that isn’t compatible with theirs.
We mainly use the Quick Method, which is the simplified version of the Cangjie method, they’re pretty much the same, but more on that later.
Each [keyboard key](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/Keyboard_layout_cangjie.png/800px-Keyboard_layout_cangjie.png)(A-Z) corresponds to a different Chinese stroke, and we type out a Chinese character(word) by literally assembling each stroke of a word, starting from the Top left, down to the Bottom right – aka the Cangjie method. Each character is unique, thus the keystroke combination is also unique.
The Quick Method simplifies the aforementioned method, by only needing to type out the first and the last keystroke. Now, since we’ve skipped a whole bunch of unique keystrokes in the middle, we end up with a lot of different words that share the same two strokes. This method solves the problem by giving us a [popup list](https://cdn.unwire.hk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2015-07-22-17_28_42_wm.jpg) with pages of selective words, which can be cycled thru with the spacebar and selected with numeric(0-9) keys.
An example of these methods:
English: My last name is Wong – 我(My)姓(Last name)黃(Wong)
Cangji: HQI(My) VHQM(Last name) TMWC(Wong)
Quick: HI7 VM2 TC6
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