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.
Illiteracy possibly. Almost certainly more people will be less able to read older texts.
If that’s going to happen anyway, they could do worse than adopt Pinyin or some variant of it. Or they might prefer something like Bopomofo if they don’t want to use Western characters for whatever reason.
Either way, any decision like that is likely to be 20-30 years away at minimum, and that’s assuming literacy rates start going down, which they might not. I doubt Xi gives it any thought at all.
Reading is easy. I have been in the US for over a decade, barely ever read chinese, still know how to read basic characters.
Its writing that is hard.
Its like, its easy to know what an artist is depicting when looking at art, but its hard to draw that same image from the top of your head. Chinese characters is basically art, complicated af.
Also, don’t worry about literacy rates. Schools in China be strict af, they make you memorize an entire story, word for word.