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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There are lots of characters, just like there are lots of words in any language, but the key is that normal people only really need to know the tip of that iceberg to get by every day. It’s no different for Chinese.
Statistically, 1100 characters is enough to understand 90% daily used Chinese. You can assume that people on the Dumber side of the average know less but can still function.
To put it in perspective, the average native English speaker ‘only’ uses ~20,000 words on a regular basis.
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