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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Fun fact, for a long time Koreans used Chinese characters, it wasn’t until king kim sae jong (iirc) came along and said there has to be a better way to improve literacy in Korea. And they came up with their own writing style called hangul that uses phonetics like the english alphabet. Low and behold it worked.
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