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…?
In: 303
You memorize. There’s no real way around symbolic languages. （Disclaimer: I didn’t grow up in China, and my chinese skills are terrible. But I grew up learning them as a second language)
If you come across a word while reading and you don’t know what it means or how to pronounce it, you can ‘guess’ based on the symbols on it. For example, you know the word 请 as ‘please’. But you encounter the word 情 which, for our example, is totally unfamiliar to you. You can deduce that because the first word is pronounced “qing”, the second word *could* (but not always) also be pronounced as ‘qing’ (if only having a different inflection/tone). You also recognize the left part of 情 as a root word symbolizing 心, meaning ‘heart’. So you can deduce it has something to do with heart or emotion. As it turns out, 情 means affection or love 爱情.
Sometimes, when people ask for clarification (esp during verbal communication), they ask “X as in XY?” For example, “I feel so numb” 我感觉很麻木。 Suppose you don’t know what the last words meant (pronounced ma-mu). The other person can say 麻辣的麻，木材的木。 （ma as in mala/numb-spicy, mu as in mucai/wood). This way, the person recognizes the other words, and can determine what the other person is trying to say.
It’s the reason why Chinese is so hard, because it’s a symbolic language rather than phonetic, and there’s just so many words. SO MANY WORDS. It rivals (or is probably only dwarfed by) Arabic as one of the hardest languages to learn.
EDIT:
To add, pinyin (and the earlier form of it, which is zhuyin) is a somewhat new-ish development (?) so many of the elderly chinese people don’t really know how to write/use it. Which is why you may notice them communicating to each other in short audio messages.
Latest Answers