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
NPR Throughline podcast just did an episode on this and its history. Very fascinating. If you’re interested in these answers and how that came to be the system, I recommend checking it out.
It used to be very difficult to learn until there were many efforts to standardize and simplify it.
Latest Answers