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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>Aren’t there thousands of characters,
Yes. There are actually tens of thousands of characters. A full catalog of all of them amounts to something like 55,000 characters, but many of them are obsolete, archaic, variations of other characters, or extremely specialized. For example, to do chemistry, a committee got together and devised Chinese characters to correspond to all of the known chemical elements besides the ones known since antiquity. Many of the characters were constructed according to certain conventions, such as all of the noble gases having the ‘gas’ radical. But not every Chinese reader recognizes the characters for arcane chemical elements like krypton (氪) or xenon (氙), or for rare earths such as yttrium (釔). But those are so specialized that most people might not recognize them and may need to look them up if they encounter them.
>with each one representing a whole word or concept?
Most of the time, Chinese characters are word roots rather than whole words, although there are some which are entire words by themselves. The typical Chinese word includes two to four characters, sometimes more, and those characters are word roots that assemble into a word when used with other characters. Think of how English has a lot of words that use Latin and Greek word roots, along with certain grammatical particles, which we assemble into words. Chinese is kinda like that.
>Do students learn every one?
No. There is a sort of 80/20 rule in Chinese, where most of the characters you use comes from a rather small set. You can read a shockingly large proportion of Chinese by knowing only a few hundred characters. By the end of high school, where you’re basically literate, you will have learned over a thousand characters, but this isn’t anywhere near an exhaustive set. When you’re in any particular field of specialization, you’ll end up learning a bunch of additional characters. For example, if you end up specializing in ancient literature, you’ll learn a bunch of obsolete or archaic characters you might not otherwise read. If you specialize in chemistry, or whatever, you may end up learning and using a bunch of characters that others don’t typically use. This is just like English; you can be literate and fluent in English and still not know some arcane vocabulary from some specialized field. But if you specialize in any field, you end up learning vocabulary from that field that others would not generally know. In Chinese, this sometimes entails learning new character combinations and even new characters.
>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?
As you’re learning, you may often use context to guess what the reading of a character is if you know the spoken expression around that unknown character. That’s how I learned a bunch of characters. But in some cases, you may come across an entirely new word with multiple characters. To look up a character, nowadays there are software tools that let you write the character, and the software will offer up some suggestions as to what might match what you wrote, and from there, you can pick the character that matches best. (See the handwriting matching tool at [Jisho.org](https://Jisho.org), which is an online dictionary for Japanese. Japanese uses Chinese characters for many of its word roots. I’m linking to it because it is an example of how people look up characters they newly encounter and for which they need the readings and definitions.
There are other ways to input the text to look up the definitions. For example, if you go to Google Translate, and select Chinese (traditional) for the input language, in the lower right corner of the input box, there is a drop down menu that offers several options:
* Zhuyin (entering in the reading using the traditional phonetic system, which is still used in Taiwan)
* Pinyin (entering in the reading using the Latin alphabet orthography used by China. This is the one that you’ll see using the letter X and Q in odd ways, like “Xi” to spell “Shee”, and Qing to spell what we’d spell as “Ching”.)
* Hand writing recognition
* Picking the radicals, and then picking a character from a list of suggestions.
Keep in mind, written Chinese got significantly changed and simplified in China, yielding “simplified Chinese”, while Taiwan maintained the use of the traditional character set, which has more strokes and often rather complicated characters. Often times, a person who is familiar with one system will run into characters from the other, which would have to be looked up. Although some conventions were followed for simplifying the characters, others have radically departed from anything recognizable from the traditional characters.
>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…?
Chinese input into computers pioneered auto-correct and auto-suggest. You can begin to type in the pronunciation of a character (using either the traditional zhuyin method, or the pinyin orthography), and the computer will bring up a list of suggestions of all of the characters that match that pronunciation. (Chinese has a lot of homophones which share the same pronunciation.) These suggestions are listed by frequency of occurrence. You can then pick the one you had in mind from the suggestion list. And once you pick one character, auto-suggest will suggest the other characters that complete a word or a phrase.
Kids now basically learn to write by rote. There some combining but most of it is just memorization and practice. As far as typing, you can do stroke order and after you get to a certain point your word will pop up. Or you can type using a phonetic system called pinyin. You type how it sounds and you get a selection of words to pick from.
I did 6 years of Mandarin and for me the answer is “not very fucking well”
Honestly it’s like learning two languages at the same time, it was easily my worst subject.
A lot of the comments have already explained most of it, but I thought I would still add my two cents.
I’m Taiwanese, so my experience might be a bit different from the Chinese. When we start learning characters, we usually start with how to “spell” them out with Bopomofo, aka Zhuyin. Unlike in China, we use these instead of pinyin. Then we start learning how to write the characters. At the same time we learn the meaning of the characters, what words they are used in, and what their radicals are. (I see people already explained radicals so I won’t go into it.)
If you look at our text books in elementary school, you can see how they evolve from texts that are all Zhuyin, to characters with Zhuyin as aid, then finally, no Zhuyin at all. We start with the easier characters, then go on to more complicated ones. When I say easier, I don’t just mean easier to write, but also characters with simpler meanings. By the time we get to maybe 6th grade, we already know more than enough to use in daily life. Later on, it gets more difficult because we start reading harder literature and ancient texts. (My Chinese grades in school sucked.)
We don’t learn every single character in the dictionary, just like how I would imagine you don’t learn all of the words in your dictionaries.
When we come across a character we don’t know, we can guess the meaning by context or by its radical, or search for it in dictionaries by guessing what the radical is or how it’s pronounced.
I would say though, most of the time when I encounter a character I don’t know, it is in someone’s name.
As for typing, in Taiwan, most of us use Zhuyin to type, and yeah, sometimes when many characters have the same pronunciation, it might take a while to find the one you need. However, computers and phones often auto-correct itself when you type in words or phrases that are commonly used, so it’s not that much of a bother.
There’s some bad information here. Firstly, characters and their components absolutely do NOT influence the pronunciation of a word in the way others suggest. This is not a feature of the language because written and spoken “Chinese” are very different things. There are many different languages spoken within China. A single word can have dozens of different pronunciations depending on language/dialect. Some regional dialects feature relatively minor differences, while others are effectively their own distinct language. Chinese is not a phonetic language, it is ideographic.
How does written Chinese work? For starters there are two writing systems in use, traditional and simplified.
Traditional characters are generally much more complex, including more strokes than the simplified versions (hence the nomenclature).
Characters are constructed as follows
1. There are a fixed number of strokes (think of brush strokes in calligraphy) in written Chinese. These strokes are combined in different ways to create a radical.
2. Radicals are the next building blocks in the language. They can be as simple as containing a single stroke (eg 一） or much more complex. Radicals usually are ascribed low level meaning e.g. plant, person, sun. But they can also contain meanings that are more abstract. Radicals are combined in different ways to create characters
3. Characters are words. It’s that simple. Each character is a full word, but as in English words can be combined in different ways to create new meaning e.g. electric 电 and brain 脑 combine to become computer 电脑 or electric brain. This is one of the areas of the language that are really fun.
It should also be be noted that radicals in one character may be written slightly, or dramatically, different in another word. This was likely due to the necessity of making the shape of a radical conform better (in terms of composition) to the shape of a specific word. An easy example here would be 女 (woman a radical that is also a word ) and 好 which means good. 好 consists is two radicals – the radical for woman 女 and the radical for son 子 . Notice that the 女 changes so that in 好 the first radical loses the right “arm” so that it fits in more tightly to the other radical.
As you can imagine, this kind of writing system makes dictionaries more complicated. In order to look up a word, since it’s impossible to sound a word out as Chinese isn’t a phonetic language, you must first isolate each character. Starting with the first character you have to decide which radical is the “main” radical in the word. It’s often the leftmost radical, but not always. So there’s a massive element of trial and error. Once you’ve chosen your radical, let’s say 女, you then count the strokes. For 女 that’s 3. Then you navigate to the radical index in your dictionary, find your radical. Then look at the other radical in your character, we’ll use 好. 子 has another three strokes. Return to 女 in the index, look for secondary radicals with 3 strokes (they’re ordered by number of strokes) and finally you’ll find your word.
Of course you don’t know what that means yet, because including the pronunciation and definition would make the radical index unusable. But you’ll be given the phonetic pronunciation, which you can now look up in a separate section of the dictionary.
Modern technology has streamlined this process. But if you studied Chinese writing even as recently as ten years ago, it was an arduous process.
Typing is actually very easy. Pinyin is the most widely used system for romanization of Chinese characters. Simply hit your zhongwen hotkey and zhongwen becomes 中文. Of course it’s not that simple. Since every syllable is capable of having 4 tones (plus neutral tone) there are 5 potential pronunciations for a given syllable. In practice it’s actually not that bad, your keyboard will pop up possible word choices as you type, narrowing and expanding choices based on context. The tech is pretty good these days both in mobile devices. There are other input methods as well, on Android and Windows you straight up write the characters, but I prefer the keyboard.
There’s obviously far more nuance to the language, but this is the basics.
I’m from Hong Kong. There’re a lot of good replies here regarding how Mainland Chinese type, though I’d like to shed some light on how we do it, since we use a completely different typing method that isn’t compatible with theirs.
We mainly use the Quick Method, which is the simplified version of the Cangjie method, they’re pretty much the same, but more on that later.
Each [keyboard key](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/Keyboard_layout_cangjie.png/800px-Keyboard_layout_cangjie.png)(A-Z) corresponds to a different Chinese stroke, and we type out a Chinese character(word) by literally assembling each stroke of a word, starting from the Top left, down to the Bottom right – aka the Cangjie method. Each character is unique, thus the keystroke combination is also unique.
The Quick Method simplifies the aforementioned method, by only needing to type out the first and the last keystroke. Now, since we’ve skipped a whole bunch of unique keystrokes in the middle, we end up with a lot of different words that share the same two strokes. This method solves the problem by giving us a [popup list](https://cdn.unwire.hk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2015-07-22-17_28_42_wm.jpg) with pages of selective words, which can be cycled thru with the spacebar and selected with numeric(0-9) keys.
An example of these methods:
English: My last name is Wong – 我(My)姓(Last name)黃(Wong)
Cangji: HQI(My) VHQM(Last name) TMWC(Wong)
Quick: HI7 VM2 TC6
A Chinese character is the smallest unit of the language which has a meaning and a pronunciation. A character is still made up of one or more sub components but as part of the written language they do not exist as an individual unit except in limited circumstances where we have to talk about and describe a character itself.
A word in Chinese is made of one or more characters, in this sense a character is closer to a syllable in English, but understanding Chinese with reference to English is not really the way to go, it is better to understand Chinese on its own terms.
So a character can be a word, eg 马 means horse as others wrote. Does this mean “a character represents a whole word or concept”? Not really, no more so than a word in English “represents a whole word or concept” IMO.
Words in Chinese are often / usually made of two characters, or more. So fire (火) + vehicle (车) = train (火车). And fire (火) + chicken (鸡) = turkey (火鸡). So while knowing characters that make up a word is useful to understanding the word, it’s not a completely useful system for understanding Chinese.
The examples above are both cases of two characters making up a word, which is distinct from a single character made up of two components. Understanding the latter is an even less precise exercise, because the resultant character often takes part of the meaning and part of the pronunciation from the subcomponents, eg fire (火 huo) + few (少shao) = stir fry (chao炒). Note the pronunciation doesn’t match, you don’t know which part gave the pronunciation, and the writing got squashed so if you don’t know Chinese you may not even recognise the components.
If you come across a character you never saw before, you should typically look it up in a dictionary, inferring from context is not reliable.
There are tens of thousands of characters and I don’t know but I guess any educated Chinese person knows over ten thousand. But remember, words are made of characters, so you may know the characters and still not know the word, so reading a Chinese newspaper based on knowing 3000 characters is a very hard task, and I doubt anyone learning Chinese can read a newspaper on the day they learned their 3000th character. There is no definitive list so no one really knows all characters, you could easily hypothesise finding a lost book of Confucius which contained a character no one saw before and thus having to learn it.
Chinese is full of homonyms, others touched on this but it’s not really in your question. Since Chinese is a tonal language, homonyms can be a match on pronunciation and tone or just pronunciation. There are probably over 40 characters pronounced shi, and someone wrote a poem using only these characters, but they are distributed across the 4 or 5 tones so you can get a sense of how many are exact vs inexact matches.
Typing, people usually use pinyin, i.e you type huo and it pops up a list sorted by frequency. Or better you type huoche and up pops train, you can click it. There is also handwriting input, almost no one uses this, although I personally do, as a learning aid, because I like being able to read and write Chinese characters (my Chinese is rubbish though). Pinyin was invented for Chinese kids to learn the language, but it is heavily used by foreign learners of Chinese too, some the the extent of being illiterate despite speaking fluently.
I think that covers all that you actually asked let us know if anything else.
Just a side note regarding typing in Chinese:
Many use Cangjie, which is where you type the word by typing the smaller character blocks that “build” a character, or Pinyin, where you type out the sound of a character and let autocorrect pick the character for you. In Taiwan (and I think only recent generations?) we also use Zhuyin, which isn’t unlike the alphabet in that we spell out the sound of characters with Zhuyin characters. Using Pinyin and Zhuyin we no longer need to know all the characters to type; the sound is enough.
My family is bilingual and we’ve realised that teaching our 2yo daughter to recognise Chinese characters is much easier than reading English. Reason being, each Chinese character is processed in the brain like a picture, so for example 木 means wood. And she remembers because the character looks like a tree! Or 人 means person because it looks like a man standing with his feet apart.
Straight memorization. There are “root words” in the character than can give you an idea of definition or pronunciation, but yeah. You have to memorize them.
Also to your other question, thr language is VERY contextual. So context is very important.
I don’t really know how typing works.
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