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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Like words in English are made up of letters, characters in Chinese are made up of different components. For example, the character 晴 is made up of and 日 and 青, which can be split further into 龶 and 月.
Usually, one half of the character gives is a “semantic” comoponent and contributes to the meaning of the character (日=’sun’, 晴 = ‘sunny/good weather’), while the other gives the character its pronunciation (in Mandarin, 青 = ‘qīng’, 晴 = ‘qíng’).
Because Chinese characters are quite complex, it is difficult to come up with a system where you can type them with a keyboard. Thus just typing them using their pronunciation is quite popular.
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