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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It’s not as different from English as you think.
As a child you were probably taught phonics: you spelled out each individual word letter by letter and combined those letters to find the meaning.
But you’ll notice that as you are reading this paragraph, you aren’t using phonics. You maybe use phonics on the rare occasion where you see an unfamiliar word, but 99.99% of the words you read now, you know instantly because you’ve memorized the shape of them. I could take the word ‘shape’ and change the font, blow it up 3000%, change the color, etc. and its meaning would still instantly pop into your head because you’ve seen it hundreds of times. That’s how Chinese speakers read the characters.
The most complicated Chinese characters are made up of small pieces called ‘radicals’. Chinese dictionaries are sorted by radical so you can search for an unknown character by its constituent parts to look up the meaning. Nowadays everyone has phone apps where they draw the character on their screen with a finger and it pops up.
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