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?
I’d say you’re not building the character, but typing in the characters one by one.
집, as you know from typing it, is three characters in one. All three components are distinct. They can’t stand alone, but that’s not much different than “c” not really being able to stand alone in English. (If we refer to the letter C, we often capitalize it)
In Japanese, people can easily type in Hiragana (their “alphabet”), and the Kanji can be suggested like with autocorrect. The sound is the same, but the visual is different.
Chinese is a different beast because they don’t have an “alphabet” of “letters” the ways that Korean and Japanese do.
(They’re not “alphabets”, but they do have elements that are much closer to letters than Chinese does)