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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Chinese written language is made up of smaller pieces that make up a whole, they’re called Radicals. You look at enough characters long enough and you’ll start to notice that words are a combination of smaller radicals that make up one big character.
女 means woman, and 馬 is horse. put them together and you get 媽 which means mother, cause all moms are crazy horse ladies, or cause the women of the house have to tend to the animals at home.
The joke that the character for war is written with two women under the same roof, is not actually true, but the concept of how Chinese writing works is correct. Some characters are meant to tell a story, you can glean a meaning from them, despite the sometimes chaotic placement of a character even if you don’t know how to pronounce it. I’m not that skilled, but I’ve seen people do it.
How they type on a keyboard:
There are two types of alphabet used throughout the Chinese speaking world, PinYin and ZhuYin.
Pinyin was developed to adapt the Romanized script, like B P M F. This alphabet system was developed in China I think as far back as the 70s.
In Taiwan and Hong Kong, people learn an alphabet called ZhuYin. which is the more traditional script. More on this a little later.
Instead of letters they look like symbols: ㄅㄆㄇㄈ
These two scripts are used on a keyboard to type with Chinese, with the same romanized keyboards and English letters for PinYin.
For ZyuYin, there will be a secondary script on the keys that will include the Zhuyin script:
[Zhuyin Keyboard image](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0810/3669/files/chinese-traditional-with-qwerty-zhuyin-mac-kblayout-unilingual-2021.png)
With the creation of PinYin also brought about the Simplified script, which created a drastic reduction in stroke order like 馬 became 马 . PinYin was an invention of Communist China, However Taiwan and Hong Kong kept the traditional script as their primary method of writing in Chinese.
There also exists a third method of typing called ChangJie. Remember how I said that each character is made up of smaller symbols and radicals? There’s a keyboard layout that uses the radicals only, and you type in maybe 4 of those keys to write a single character.
There are also other Chinese and countries that use Chinese script like Singapore and Japan. Singapore has also adopted Simplified character script, However Japanese Kanji uses a mix of both traditional, and simplified, and even have their own limited variation of characters, but some Chinese are able to read a good percentage of a Japanese newspaper. Korea also stuck to Traditional Chinese script. Their use of Chinese characters in their language is similar to how the Japanese use it.
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