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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There’s some bad information here. Firstly, characters and their components absolutely do NOT influence the pronunciation of a word in the way others suggest. This is not a feature of the language because written and spoken “Chinese” are very different things. There are many different languages spoken within China. A single word can have dozens of different pronunciations depending on language/dialect. Some regional dialects feature relatively minor differences, while others are effectively their own distinct language. Chinese is not a phonetic language, it is ideographic.
How does written Chinese work? For starters there are two writing systems in use, traditional and simplified.
Traditional characters are generally much more complex, including more strokes than the simplified versions (hence the nomenclature).
Characters are constructed as follows
1. There are a fixed number of strokes (think of brush strokes in calligraphy) in written Chinese. These strokes are combined in different ways to create a radical.
2. Radicals are the next building blocks in the language. They can be as simple as containing a single stroke (eg 一） or much more complex. Radicals usually are ascribed low level meaning e.g. plant, person, sun. But they can also contain meanings that are more abstract. Radicals are combined in different ways to create characters
3. Characters are words. It’s that simple. Each character is a full word, but as in English words can be combined in different ways to create new meaning e.g. electric 电 and brain 脑 combine to become computer 电脑 or electric brain. This is one of the areas of the language that are really fun.
It should also be be noted that radicals in one character may be written slightly, or dramatically, different in another word. This was likely due to the necessity of making the shape of a radical conform better (in terms of composition) to the shape of a specific word. An easy example here would be 女 (woman a radical that is also a word ) and 好 which means good. 好 consists is two radicals – the radical for woman 女 and the radical for son 子 . Notice that the 女 changes so that in 好 the first radical loses the right “arm” so that it fits in more tightly to the other radical.
As you can imagine, this kind of writing system makes dictionaries more complicated. In order to look up a word, since it’s impossible to sound a word out as Chinese isn’t a phonetic language, you must first isolate each character. Starting with the first character you have to decide which radical is the “main” radical in the word. It’s often the leftmost radical, but not always. So there’s a massive element of trial and error. Once you’ve chosen your radical, let’s say 女, you then count the strokes. For 女 that’s 3. Then you navigate to the radical index in your dictionary, find your radical. Then look at the other radical in your character, we’ll use 好. 子 has another three strokes. Return to 女 in the index, look for secondary radicals with 3 strokes (they’re ordered by number of strokes) and finally you’ll find your word.
Of course you don’t know what that means yet, because including the pronunciation and definition would make the radical index unusable. But you’ll be given the phonetic pronunciation, which you can now look up in a separate section of the dictionary.
Modern technology has streamlined this process. But if you studied Chinese writing even as recently as ten years ago, it was an arduous process.
Typing is actually very easy. Pinyin is the most widely used system for romanization of Chinese characters. Simply hit your zhongwen hotkey and zhongwen becomes 中文. Of course it’s not that simple. Since every syllable is capable of having 4 tones (plus neutral tone) there are 5 potential pronunciations for a given syllable. In practice it’s actually not that bad, your keyboard will pop up possible word choices as you type, narrowing and expanding choices based on context. The tech is pretty good these days both in mobile devices. There are other input methods as well, on Android and Windows you straight up write the characters, but I prefer the keyboard.
There’s obviously far more nuance to the language, but this is the basics.
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