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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Chinese is my second language so I can’t speak to how kids learn growing up, but I can talk to how to type Chinese. There are two methods i know of. I, personally, use pinyin to type on the characters. Pinyin is just like the english spelling of a character. You first type the pinyin, then you will be given a small selection of characters. Sometimes the computer will be able to put in the character for you if given enough context. I have an example: I type in 马 (ma) which means horse. “Ma” is what i type, the i am presented “马，吗， 麻”. I selected the first one since i wanted to say horse. Hopefully this helped a little.
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