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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Adding on to what others have said the computer, and especially the smartphone, has really upended Chinese culture around language. Prior to the computers being widespread within the mass populace, it was seen as uneducated and low-class to not know how to write and read the popular 3000 characters, especially with poor penmanship. People’s social classes were often elicited from their ability to recognize and write complex/seldom used characters.
That has really changed now that most people very infrequently actually write Chinese by hand. Pinyin input on computers means people only need to know the sound the character makes and passing knowledge of how a character looks. The millennial generation and younger, while they can easily read the most common characters, often cannot write many of them, especially as they get further from the younger years of primary education. Not really a knock on them – there’s just significantly less usage for that kind of knowledge now, and instead a lot of that cognitive load and learning time of rote memorization in school has been spent elsewhere (coding, engineering, learning English, etc.) That’s a huge generational shift due to the computer.
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