Text on iPhone

Question

I was given an old iPhone 4 running iOS 7.1.2, and am stubborn enough to expect it to work. Typing text is taking me five times as long as it did on my old non-smart phone. Please explain to me how I can...
Skip over characters (like the left-right arrow keys does on a normal keyboard).
Activate predictive completion (Example, I type "Amer" and it fills the "ica".)
get the cursor to move to where I tap. This is successful about one time in ten taps on average, and often if I tap on the first character of a long phone number, it just places the cursor at the end.
One other annoyance is that the language changes on a whim. It was installed as Chinese and I've changed it to English, but from time to time it switches to Chinese within an app, such as Contacts. If I press the bottom button twice, it will go back to the main menu (or to a reduced-size row of "pages" and I can then tap the reduced main menu to get the main menu), which will be in English again. Can I lock the language so it never changes, or am I accidentally touching a "language switcher" button somewhere on the screen?

Answer 1

Moof666 wrote:
You could also be A BIT LESS LIKE A GEEKY TEACHER
I am a teacher and it, it should be pretty obvious by my participation here, that I am also a geek. I'm pretty proud of both of those things so I don't want to be less like that.
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." Directing you to the manual (and the specific page on the manual, I might add) will help you not only with this question but with the other basic questions you may have. Unless, of course, you're too lazy to help educate yourself. We teachers hate that.
Auto-correct works is what Apple calls predictive text. As you type, it will give you suggestions. I will leave you to explore the rest of how that works in the manual.
Best of luck.