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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It’s not that different from learning English.
English words are written in a line, for example the word EXPLAIN, it can be deconstructed into ex(make it to be) and plain(obvious), put together it’s explain, to make it obvious. ( I don’t actually know that, just for example)
Chinese words are written in the combination of shapes, for example the word 认，the left part means announce, the right part means a people, someone announce they know a people, so the word 认means distinguish.
Of course, most time we just remember the word by repeating in life.
We do learn every character , same pronunciation can represent a lot of different meanings.
The more vocabularies you know, the better you can guess.
We type in phonetic symbol, using exactly the same 26English letters. For example ma妈 means mom，when you type ma, the software would give you a choice in 妈（mom），嘛（what），马（horse），码（yard），etc, you choose what you want from the list. It sounds big work, but in daily life we just use some certain words, and the software is smart, if you type the whole word or sentence it usually knows what you mean.
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