ELI5- How does written Chinese work?

Question

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

Answer 1

For typing on mobile using Pinyin, let’s say “wo3 zai4 chi1 wan3 can1 (I’m eating dinner)” I just need to type “wzcwc”, it will output the correct sentence in Chinese (most of the time).