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…?
In: 303
Oversimplification.
Every word is it’s own drawing/symbol
Next complication level. You can combine some symbols to form a new word
1. Unlike alphabet languages, you can’t learn to pronounce chinese symbols without being taught.
2. No way of knowing. You can guess from context, but that’s never guaranteed
3. You need to learn 1000 – 2000 characters to read a newspaper
4. Typing in chinese is romanising the sounds. Like typing ‘ma’ gives me a couple of options, and you pick from that. It gets easier with practice.
Yes learning mandarin as is tedious. Repetition repetition. Reps reps reps.
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