How do chinese or japanese PC keyboards work when they have thousands of different characters
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They type phonetically and use a piece of software in Windows / whatever OS called an IME (Input Method Editor) to find the correct characters they want to type from a list. Usually it detects the correct one based on the context of what they’re typing, so it’s pretty fast, but sometimes you have to select the correct one, especially when typing names and proper nouns that may have unique character combinations.
Basically, they use pronounciation. Pinyin in Chinese is to phonetically spell the word in the English alphabet. Thereby, you just type out the pronunciation and it corrects you by using a software from the OS, Input Method Editors.
They both have a phonetic typing system. You would type the word out phonetically and there would be a popup with a list of matching characters to choose like a phone autocomplete.
[Here’s a video of the Japanese version in action](https://youtu.be/g3xmRCrbLVU)
Other people already point out the Phonetic spellings (express as pinyin for Mainland Mandarin and Bopomofo for Taiwanese Mandarin). However, Another common way, especially in Hong Kong, is [Changjie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method)
The thing is that people look at the character as a whole; however, once one realized that each character composes of components (radicals), then it mapped to the Qwerty keyboard. Even in terms of learning, you learn each radicals.
Both Japanese and Chinese use pinyin (EDIT: pinyin for chinese, romanji for japanese, but effectively the same method) or phoentic spelling, ie by typing the pronunciation of the word in English. Downside of this is that many words are pronounced the same and is very heavily contextual. However the predictive function of the input method help gives you the most likely word you want to use. That should be good enough for general use.
For Chinese however another method is cangjie. This one breaks down each character into pen strokes, like a horizontal line, vertical line, a curve etc. This method almost always give you the exact character you need, but is way harder to learn. There are 50+ pen strokes to learn and a single letter on the keyboard can represent multiple types of strokes However it can be faster than pinyin if you are equally proficient in cangjie and pinyin, especially if you do professional writing.
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