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
Not from China but raised learning it.
Yes it’s true that there are thousands of characters and every character looks different, but it’s not really that simple.
If you understand how the words are formed, you can guesstimate its meaning even if you can’t actually verbally read/pronounce it. For eg, Chinese characters usually have a half dedicated to its meaning and a half dedicated to its pronunciation. Here: 话，说，讲 all have the same thing on the left, right? That “side” thing tells you these words are about speaking/talking, so you can gather that if you see a similar character, even without knowing how to read it verbally. Vice versa. ( Of course, there are very many exceptions.)
But yes, for many basic words we memorise how they look/sound like.
As for typing- there are several keyboards for this. Using the Pinyin systen is quite common now. It’s quite similar to the English keyboard and you type the pronunciation of the word you want, then select from a list of choices. (This is because many Chinese characters sound the same, and the device suggests a list based on the context of what you’re typing.) You can also have a little drawing board where you manually draw/each character, but that’s quite rare because it’s much more time-consuming. Some people in China use another keyboard and it looks like a grid (like how old phones with physical buttons used to look like), but I don’t know how that works.
Latest Answers