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 lot of the comments have already explained most of it, but I thought I would still add my two cents.
I’m Taiwanese, so my experience might be a bit different from the Chinese. When we start learning characters, we usually start with how to “spell” them out with Bopomofo, aka Zhuyin. Unlike in China, we use these instead of pinyin. Then we start learning how to write the characters. At the same time we learn the meaning of the characters, what words they are used in, and what their radicals are. (I see people already explained radicals so I won’t go into it.)
If you look at our text books in elementary school, you can see how they evolve from texts that are all Zhuyin, to characters with Zhuyin as aid, then finally, no Zhuyin at all. We start with the easier characters, then go on to more complicated ones. When I say easier, I don’t just mean easier to write, but also characters with simpler meanings. By the time we get to maybe 6th grade, we already know more than enough to use in daily life. Later on, it gets more difficult because we start reading harder literature and ancient texts. (My Chinese grades in school sucked.)
We don’t learn every single character in the dictionary, just like how I would imagine you don’t learn all of the words in your dictionaries.
When we come across a character we don’t know, we can guess the meaning by context or by its radical, or search for it in dictionaries by guessing what the radical is or how it’s pronounced.
I would say though, most of the time when I encounter a character I don’t know, it is in someone’s name.
As for typing, in Taiwan, most of us use Zhuyin to type, and yeah, sometimes when many characters have the same pronunciation, it might take a while to find the one you need. However, computers and phones often auto-correct itself when you type in words or phrases that are commonly used, so it’s not that much of a bother.
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