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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>Aren’t there thousands of characters,
Yes. There are actually tens of thousands of characters. A full catalog of all of them amounts to something like 55,000 characters, but many of them are obsolete, archaic, variations of other characters, or extremely specialized. For example, to do chemistry, a committee got together and devised Chinese characters to correspond to all of the known chemical elements besides the ones known since antiquity. Many of the characters were constructed according to certain conventions, such as all of the noble gases having the ‘gas’ radical. But not every Chinese reader recognizes the characters for arcane chemical elements like krypton (氪) or xenon (氙), or for rare earths such as yttrium (釔). But those are so specialized that most people might not recognize them and may need to look them up if they encounter them.
>with each one representing a whole word or concept?
Most of the time, Chinese characters are word roots rather than whole words, although there are some which are entire words by themselves. The typical Chinese word includes two to four characters, sometimes more, and those characters are word roots that assemble into a word when used with other characters. Think of how English has a lot of words that use Latin and Greek word roots, along with certain grammatical particles, which we assemble into words. Chinese is kinda like that.
>Do students learn every one?
No. There is a sort of 80/20 rule in Chinese, where most of the characters you use comes from a rather small set. You can read a shockingly large proportion of Chinese by knowing only a few hundred characters. By the end of high school, where you’re basically literate, you will have learned over a thousand characters, but this isn’t anywhere near an exhaustive set. When you’re in any particular field of specialization, you’ll end up learning a bunch of additional characters. For example, if you end up specializing in ancient literature, you’ll learn a bunch of obsolete or archaic characters you might not otherwise read. If you specialize in chemistry, or whatever, you may end up learning and using a bunch of characters that others don’t typically use. This is just like English; you can be literate and fluent in English and still not know some arcane vocabulary from some specialized field. But if you specialize in any field, you end up learning vocabulary from that field that others would not generally know. In Chinese, this sometimes entails learning new character combinations and even new characters.
>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?
As you’re learning, you may often use context to guess what the reading of a character is if you know the spoken expression around that unknown character. That’s how I learned a bunch of characters. But in some cases, you may come across an entirely new word with multiple characters. To look up a character, nowadays there are software tools that let you write the character, and the software will offer up some suggestions as to what might match what you wrote, and from there, you can pick the character that matches best. (See the handwriting matching tool at [Jisho.org](https://Jisho.org), which is an online dictionary for Japanese. Japanese uses Chinese characters for many of its word roots. I’m linking to it because it is an example of how people look up characters they newly encounter and for which they need the readings and definitions.
There are other ways to input the text to look up the definitions. For example, if you go to Google Translate, and select Chinese (traditional) for the input language, in the lower right corner of the input box, there is a drop down menu that offers several options:
* Zhuyin (entering in the reading using the traditional phonetic system, which is still used in Taiwan)
* Pinyin (entering in the reading using the Latin alphabet orthography used by China. This is the one that you’ll see using the letter X and Q in odd ways, like “Xi” to spell “Shee”, and Qing to spell what we’d spell as “Ching”.)
* Hand writing recognition
* Picking the radicals, and then picking a character from a list of suggestions.
Keep in mind, written Chinese got significantly changed and simplified in China, yielding “simplified Chinese”, while Taiwan maintained the use of the traditional character set, which has more strokes and often rather complicated characters. Often times, a person who is familiar with one system will run into characters from the other, which would have to be looked up. Although some conventions were followed for simplifying the characters, others have radically departed from anything recognizable from the traditional characters.
>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…?
Chinese input into computers pioneered auto-correct and auto-suggest. You can begin to type in the pronunciation of a character (using either the traditional zhuyin method, or the pinyin orthography), and the computer will bring up a list of suggestions of all of the characters that match that pronunciation. (Chinese has a lot of homophones which share the same pronunciation.) These suggestions are listed by frequency of occurrence. You can then pick the one you had in mind from the suggestion list. And once you pick one character, auto-suggest will suggest the other characters that complete a word or a phrase.
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