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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> Aren’t there thousands of characters, with each one representing a whole word or concept? Do students learn every one?
There are thousands of characters in Chinese, but in day-to-day life you really don’t need to learn that many characters. It’s estimated that you only need to know the 2000-3000 most common characters to read a Chinese newspaper and understand everything. It’s just like there are thousands upon thousands of words in an English dictionary, but most people get by in life without knowing many of those words.
Also, most “words” in Chinese are represented by a few characters, usually two or three. You can think of it like simpler characters coming together to form a “compound” word. For example, computer in Chinese translates to 电脑, which contains the character for electricity (电) and the character for brain (脑).
> 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?
Like if you come across an English word you don’t know, you can figure it out from context or you can look it up in a dictionary (or these days you would probably just use an app).
English words you are usually able to sound out from their spelling, which helps if you’ve heard a word and just haven’t read it before. With Chinese characters, you are not guaranteed to be able to guess the sound of the character, but often you can just like in English. This is because most Chinese characters are actually “compound” characters, comprised of one half (the radical) that conveys meaning, and one half that coveys the sound of the word.
For example, 马 is the Chinese character meaning horse, and is pronounced “Ma”. 妈 is the Chinese character meaning mom, and is also pronounced “Ma”. You can see that 妈 contains the character 马 in it, as well as the character 女, which is the Chinese character meaning woman. In essence, the character 妈 is built from two parts. It means something related to woman (女) and it sounds similar to the character for horse (马). If you somehow didn’t know what the character 妈 meant, you would likely be able to guess from these context clues.
> 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…?
You type the pinyin (the phoenetic representation) of the word or phrase you want and the software will fill in the most commonly used word or phrase that matches. It’s sort of like an AI trying to predict what you mean. If you want to say an uncommon character, there is a drop down menu that lets you select alternate meanings. Typing in Chinese can actually be pretty quick, because Chinese characters convey information more densely than English letters, and you can often type shortened versions of the most common phrases and the software will still be able to predict you. For example, if you wanted to say hello, you may just need to type “nh” and because that’s such a common phrase the software will identify it correctly as 你好 (Ni hao).
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