So, if the Chinese don’t have an alphabet and use only pictograms comprising of over 6500 characters, how do they type on a keyboard? Do they have really large keyboards with over 6500 keys or do they just say “Screw Mandarin” and type in English (which can’t be true because I’ve seen Chinese characters on webpages/spam emails)? Is there some kind of algorithmic key pressing magic that goes on in order to produce said characters?
Now that they type out characters phonetically, a lot of people don’t remember Chinese characters any more, even though they can still mostly read them, which is starting to be a new problem over there.
There is over 20k characters and most people know or use like 2 or 3k of them. Educated Chinese know like 6k on average. And it seems every decade the number goes down.
Curious what it’s evolving into.