I've been wondering about the use of ideograms in the Chinese languages and in Japanese. It is hard to remember all the different characters? Does it take a long time to handwrite Chinese and Japanese? What about obscure and archaic characters, do you just look them up in the dictionary? How do you type Chinese and Japanese? After all there can't possibly be a key for each character.

Postscript:
I know that Chinese has many dialects, of which the primary one is mandarin spoken by about 850 million people. These dialects are often mutually unintelligible in speech, but are far more similar in writing. Also, naturally Japanese and Chinese are very different languages.

However, it stands to reason that they have many similarities and that it is much easier to go from Japanese to Chinese and vice versa, then it is to go from an alphabetic or abjad language, then it is to Japanese or Chinese.

I understand that Japanese also uses Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries, but am unsure how that works in relation to Kanji.

Also: Japanese and Chinese natives, please correct me if I'm wrong about anything.