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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Children are taught basic characters first then slowly progress with more difficult characters as they grow older (like how you would with other languages). Usually they learn the characters through rote memorisation and repeatedly writing the same word over and over again. Typically you don’t learn every single characters (like how you don’t need to know every single words of English). I think to be able to read most things you’ll need about 2000 – 3000 characters out of the tens of thousands there are.
As for the typing, there are several ways but the one I prefer is through 拼音(pinyin). Pinyin is like Chinese but written in ABCs based on their pronunciation. So to write something e.g. “Big” , I’d type how it sounds onto the keyboard “da”. Then a list of words that sounds the same would show up like 打，大，哒 (the more commonly used ones will show op first) so I’d select that.
There is also handwriting where you just write the characters on your phone.
There are also other ways of typing like using the “radicals” (components that make up a Chinese characters). I’m not well verse in this method at all so I might be wrong, but basically you put the components together like a puzzle. If I want to write 好，then I’ll first choose the 女 then a list would popup and then I’ll choose 子 to make 好。
Hopefully I’ve answered most of your question. I’m typing on a phone rn so apologies if I missed anything or mistyped anything.
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