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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People learn Chinese from using radicals and well, memorizing each character. Luckily, they don’t need to learn all of them.
Using pinyin is common to type Chinese; on mobile, they can just write it out or use text to speech too.
It’s not that different from learning English.
English words are written in a line, for example the word EXPLAIN, it can be deconstructed into ex(make it to be) and plain(obvious), put together it’s explain, to make it obvious. ( I don’t actually know that, just for example)
Chinese words are written in the combination of shapes, for example the word 认，the left part means announce, the right part means a people, someone announce they know a people, so the word 认means distinguish.
Of course, most time we just remember the word by repeating in life.
We do learn every character , same pronunciation can represent a lot of different meanings.
The more vocabularies you know, the better you can guess.
We type in phonetic symbol, using exactly the same 26English letters. For example ma妈 means mom，when you type ma, the software would give you a choice in 妈（mom），嘛（what），马（horse），码（yard），etc, you choose what you want from the list. It sounds big work, but in daily life we just use some certain words, and the software is smart, if you type the whole word or sentence it usually knows what you mean.
Chinese written language is made up of smaller pieces that make up a whole, they’re called Radicals. You look at enough characters long enough and you’ll start to notice that words are a combination of smaller radicals that make up one big character.
女 means woman, and 馬 is horse. put them together and you get 媽 which means mother, cause all moms are crazy horse ladies, or cause the women of the house have to tend to the animals at home.
The joke that the character for war is written with two women under the same roof, is not actually true, but the concept of how Chinese writing works is correct. Some characters are meant to tell a story, you can glean a meaning from them, despite the sometimes chaotic placement of a character even if you don’t know how to pronounce it. I’m not that skilled, but I’ve seen people do it.
How they type on a keyboard:
There are two types of alphabet used throughout the Chinese speaking world, PinYin and ZhuYin.
Pinyin was developed to adapt the Romanized script, like B P M F. This alphabet system was developed in China I think as far back as the 70s.
In Taiwan and Hong Kong, people learn an alphabet called ZhuYin. which is the more traditional script. More on this a little later.
Instead of letters they look like symbols: ㄅㄆㄇㄈ
These two scripts are used on a keyboard to type with Chinese, with the same romanized keyboards and English letters for PinYin.
For ZyuYin, there will be a secondary script on the keys that will include the Zhuyin script:
[Zhuyin Keyboard image](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0810/3669/files/chinese-traditional-with-qwerty-zhuyin-mac-kblayout-unilingual-2021.png)
With the creation of PinYin also brought about the Simplified script, which created a drastic reduction in stroke order like 馬 became 马 . PinYin was an invention of Communist China, However Taiwan and Hong Kong kept the traditional script as their primary method of writing in Chinese.
There also exists a third method of typing called ChangJie. Remember how I said that each character is made up of smaller symbols and radicals? There’s a keyboard layout that uses the radicals only, and you type in maybe 4 of those keys to write a single character.
There are also other Chinese and countries that use Chinese script like Singapore and Japan. Singapore has also adopted Simplified character script, However Japanese Kanji uses a mix of both traditional, and simplified, and even have their own limited variation of characters, but some Chinese are able to read a good percentage of a Japanese newspaper. Korea also stuck to Traditional Chinese script. Their use of Chinese characters in their language is similar to how the Japanese use it.
There are a lot of bi-linguals on this thread. Do you find learning to write English easier/harder than Chinese languages? If you are an immigrant to an English speaking country, what about your kids? Do they seem to have learned to write English faster than you did Chinese when you were a child?
Fun fact, for a long time Koreans used Chinese characters, it wasn’t until king kim sae jong (iirc) came along and said there has to be a better way to improve literacy in Korea. And they came up with their own writing style called hangul that uses phonetics like the english alphabet. Low and behold it worked.
There are lots of characters, just like there are lots of words in any language, but the key is that normal people only really need to know the tip of that iceberg to get by every day. It’s no different for Chinese.
Statistically, 1100 characters is enough to understand 90% daily used Chinese. You can assume that people on the Dumber side of the average know less but can still function.
To put it in perspective, the average native English speaker ‘only’ uses ~20,000 words on a regular basis.
The Radiolab episode [The Wubi Effect](https://radiolab.org/podcast/wubi-effect) has an excellent explanation of the breakthrough that enabled typing in ‘Chinese’. In the episode they mention that before the breakthrough, China was considering replacing their written (typed) word with Esperanto or English (!)
I’m a 1.5-generation Chinese immigrant, born in China and lived there until middle school, so I can answer your question.
Chinese children learn Pinyin first. You know how you see Chinese people’s names written out like Zhang, Wang, etc? That’s Pinyin.
So in preschool and kindergarten we learn Pinyin. We memorize the alphabets, of which there are three, pronounced in the Chinese way:
* Consonants: BPMF DTNL GKH JQX ZCS ZhChSh RYW
* Vowels: AEIOUü ai ei ui ao ou…..
* “Stand-Alones”: dunno how to explain this but you can’t separate the consonant and vowel components like with other sounds. It’s just a sound by itself. Like “yi” for example.
It’s a lot of memorization. I wrote it out in the order that we memorize them in. We recite them just like kids do the ABCs here. We write it out in worksheets over and over again like American elementary schools.
We also have those colorful alphabets in classrooms, you know like “A” next to picture of an “apple”, “B” next to a balloon. Same for us. For example the vowel “e” you would often find accompanied by a picture of a goose, 鹅, both for its shape, that the e kinda looks like a reflection of a goose, with the curl at the bottom being its neck, as well as the pronunciation. 鹅in Pinyin is just “e”.
Learning the characters or pictographs or whatever you wanna call them, is a lot of memorization and repetition too.
We learn Pinyin first, because early elementary school textbooks and other books for young children will have Pinyin written on top of all the pictographs. We read short stories and poems, using the Pinyin notations to sound it all out, until we have them memorized. A common assignment in Chinese elementary school classrooms is to recite a passage in front of the class, either from the text or from memory. I remember my parents had to sign a lot of my worksheets attesting that I had recited the assigned passage from memory in front of them.
How does this help, you ask? OK let me see if I can articulate this lol. Say I’m completely illiterate and someone tells me the sentence **“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”** They explain what it means too. Repeat until I memorized the sentence word for word and knows what every word means.
Then they show me the sentence written out on paper. Now it’s like I can read! So, I know the “the” sound means a definite article. I use it all the time when speaking, and now I know what it looks like! (So next time when I want to say something like, say,“I liked the food”, I won’t know how to write anything else but I can write “the”!) I also know that the “quick” sound means “fast”. And so on.
Learning Chinese is like a jigsaw puzzle. At first it seems impossible, but as you gather more and more pieces—”The” and “fox” and “dog” and “jump” and etc. etc. etc.—eventually you can put them all together.
Not from China but raised learning it.
Yes it’s true that there are thousands of characters and every character looks different, but it’s not really that simple.
If you understand how the words are formed, you can guesstimate its meaning even if you can’t actually verbally read/pronounce it. For eg, Chinese characters usually have a half dedicated to its meaning and a half dedicated to its pronunciation. Here: 话，说，讲 all have the same thing on the left, right? That “side” thing tells you these words are about speaking/talking, so you can gather that if you see a similar character, even without knowing how to read it verbally. Vice versa. ( Of course, there are very many exceptions.)
But yes, for many basic words we memorise how they look/sound like.
As for typing- there are several keyboards for this. Using the Pinyin systen is quite common now. It’s quite similar to the English keyboard and you type the pronunciation of the word you want, then select from a list of choices. (This is because many Chinese characters sound the same, and the device suggests a list based on the context of what you’re typing.) You can also have a little drawing board where you manually draw/each character, but that’s quite rare because it’s much more time-consuming. Some people in China use another keyboard and it looks like a grid (like how old phones with physical buttons used to look like), but I don’t know how that works.
NPR Throughline podcast just did an episode on this and its history. Very fascinating. If you’re interested in these answers and how that came to be the system, I recommend checking it out.
It used to be very difficult to learn until there were many efforts to standardize and simplify it.
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