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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I’m a 1.5-generation Chinese immigrant, born in China and lived there until middle school, so I can answer your question.
Chinese children learn Pinyin first. You know how you see Chinese people’s names written out like Zhang, Wang, etc? That’s Pinyin.
So in preschool and kindergarten we learn Pinyin. We memorize the alphabets, of which there are three, pronounced in the Chinese way:
* Consonants: BPMF DTNL GKH JQX ZCS ZhChSh RYW
* Vowels: AEIOUü ai ei ui ao ou…..
* “Stand-Alones”: dunno how to explain this but you can’t separate the consonant and vowel components like with other sounds. It’s just a sound by itself. Like “yi” for example.
It’s a lot of memorization. I wrote it out in the order that we memorize them in. We recite them just like kids do the ABCs here. We write it out in worksheets over and over again like American elementary schools.
We also have those colorful alphabets in classrooms, you know like “A” next to picture of an “apple”, “B” next to a balloon. Same for us. For example the vowel “e” you would often find accompanied by a picture of a goose, 鹅, both for its shape, that the e kinda looks like a reflection of a goose, with the curl at the bottom being its neck, as well as the pronunciation. 鹅in Pinyin is just “e”.
Learning the characters or pictographs or whatever you wanna call them, is a lot of memorization and repetition too.
We learn Pinyin first, because early elementary school textbooks and other books for young children will have Pinyin written on top of all the pictographs. We read short stories and poems, using the Pinyin notations to sound it all out, until we have them memorized. A common assignment in Chinese elementary school classrooms is to recite a passage in front of the class, either from the text or from memory. I remember my parents had to sign a lot of my worksheets attesting that I had recited the assigned passage from memory in front of them.
How does this help, you ask? OK let me see if I can articulate this lol. Say I’m completely illiterate and someone tells me the sentence **“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”** They explain what it means too. Repeat until I memorized the sentence word for word and knows what every word means.
Then they show me the sentence written out on paper. Now it’s like I can read! So, I know the “the” sound means a definite article. I use it all the time when speaking, and now I know what it looks like! (So next time when I want to say something like, say,“I liked the food”, I won’t know how to write anything else but I can write “the”!) I also know that the “quick” sound means “fast”. And so on.
Learning Chinese is like a jigsaw puzzle. At first it seems impossible, but as you gather more and more pieces—”The” and “fox” and “dog” and “jump” and etc. etc. etc.—eventually you can put them all together.
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