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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In Chinese Children start by learning the basic radicals, the simple symbols (man, woman, horse, I, you, etc.) Then they learn more complex symbols (woman+child=good, woman+horse=mother, etc.) As for typing, there are keyboards that use radicals and common symbols, but also they can type using pinyin (the romanized form of Chinese) so they would type “wo” and it would change to the symbol for “self/I”
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