# Learning tips: Learning Chinese characters



## maghanish2

Hello everyone!

I am very interested in learning Chinese.  However, I don't want to just start off with the grammar and learning all the rules of the language.  First, I would like to become familiar with writing and pronouncing many of the symbols of Chinese.

What I am looking for is a website that provides, for example, one new Chinese word per day, with the symbol and how to say it.  Preferably, I would like an animated picture of how to write the symbol (stroke order).

If anyone knows about a site like this, it would be greatly appreciated!  I very much want to learn this amazing language!


----------



## kastner

Try this site out
http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html


----------



## univerio

You might want to start off with pinyin and its rules first. 
http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Chinese/topics/pinyin/pinyin.html

And, sorry if I'm discouraging you, but one character a day will probably take you something like 9 or 10 years to learn all the common characters.


----------



## kastner

univerio said:


> You might want to start off with pinyin and its rules first.
> http://hua.umf.maine.edu/Chinese/topics/pinyin/pinyin.html
> 
> And, sorry if I'm discouraging you, but one character a day will probably take you something like 9 or 10 years to learn all the common characters.



Well, I'll say the KEY is not "How many characters have I acquired?", should be "How many words/phrases can I understand after having learned 1000-2000 characters?"

Trust me, it will take much time to collocate different characters than to recognize/read them.


----------



## maghanish2

Thank you for the responses!  And yes, I realize that it will probably take a long time to learn all the common characters if I do one a day. But I was just thinking that as I start to learn and get used to writing the characters, I should only do maybe one a day, and then when I get more comfortable, do maybe 5-6 a day or something. But is there any site that you know of that would demonstrate the stroke order maybe!?


----------



## samanthalee

You can find some great free online lesson from our Resource Sticky.   You would probably be interested in the websites listed under *Stroke Order* (writing):



> http://www.usc.edu/dept/ealc/chinese/character/ - animated characters, simplified and traditional. With Pinyin, Realplayer audio files and definitions in English.
> http://www.liwin.com/calligraphy/ - animated characters, simplified and traditional (based on the Practical Chinese Reader series). With Pinyin, Quicktime audio files and definitions in English.
> http://www.hanyu.com.cn/en/htm_chinese/01.htm - animated characters, simplified. With Pinyin and audio files.


----------



## Staarkali

I would agree with what has been said, one character a day is far too few, whatever your goal is. Especially when beginning, you might remember 10 per days


----------



## aussie89

Hi all!
I'm learning chinese since four months, I have two questions! I would like to ask if do you know a good website where I can find chinese grammar with a lot of exercises, and where I can do exercise with characters;The second question I have is: In your opinion which is the best way to learn chinese characters?
Talk to you soon!
Bye bye


----------



## Humberto Duan

I'm a chinese,I can't tell you a website of chinese grammar because I never use it. But I think the best way to learn chinese characters is to communicate with chinese people, it's better to stay in China, of course.


----------



## BorisDtt

aussie89 said:


> Hi all!
> I'm learning chinese since four months, I have two questions! I would like to ask if do you know a good website where I can find chinese grammar with a lot of exercises, and where I can do exercise with characters;The second question I have is: In your opinion which is the best way to learn chinese characters?
> Talk to you soon!
> Bye bye



Chinese characters are usually constructed by two part: one is a semantic(radicals) symbol and the other one is a phonetic symbol. It is suggested that you should firstly learn the radicals of Chinese characters before you move on.

Humberto Duan is right. I think reading grammar books and doing exercises is not a good idea for beginners. What Chinese grammar experts normally do, is to make the grammar even hard to understand. To get off to a good start, You may learn Chinese characters from the books that contains some useful daily expressions and survival phrases.


----------



## aussie89

Ok thank you for the advices!


----------



## palomnik

aussie89 said:


> In your opinion which is the best way to learn chinese characters?
> Talk to you soon!
> Bye bye



The time honored way - both for Chinese children and for foreigners - is to start off learning the simplest characters, particularly the ones that are radicals. When you can get the balance on these right, the more complicated ones will follow. The problem with this approach is that sometimes the simplest characters are not the commonest ones, and as a result you start off learning characters that you won't use much initially. 

Knowing stroke order is imperative to a well-balanced hand, and study materials that show stroke order are useful. You may want to check out http://www.nciku.com/ to see how characters are composed.


----------



## viajero_canjeado

I've been trying to learn a set number of characters per day on practice sheets that I guess are commonly used by students in Taiwan, where I started learning Chinese. You could easily make your own practice sheets: they're just columns of boxes (basically a gridlike pattern of squares), and in each column I will practice a single character, annotating the definition and pronunciation at the top and repeating it to myself as I write it over and over, also thinking about how the radicals contribute to the sound or meaning of the character. I normally write each character about 120 times or so. Usually I don't have to go through this process more than once per character, but sometimes I do it twice or even three times until I get it (especially for obscure characters I don't encounter a lot during reading). To ensure you've at least gotten the seed planted in your brain, you should be able to recall the pronunciation (including the tone) and at least a shadow of the character's meaning when reading Chinese later, be it a newspaper, children's book, or whatever. I like practicing with a bilingual Bible, cause the translation's right there and it's a text I'm familiar with, so that helps with contextualizing the Chinese characters without frequently consulting the English.

...Anyway, maybe you could also find a buddy to chat with online; that would help your reading comprehension and expression skills (especially if they'll correct you). But of course, the most optimal situation would be for you to live awhile where Chinese is spoken all around you at all times.

Lastly, the dictionary at mdbg.net has proven indispensable for me. Don't take offense WR! I still love the forums, 嘻嘻..


----------



## philosophia85

Hi aussie89,

In HK elementary school, we have to practice writing Chinese characters like viajero mentioned.  The teacher designated a set of words, and we have to keep writing on a box sheet until there's no more space.  Also, dictation is very useful in testing your Chinese Characters.  Either have somebody read out a paragraph or memorize it, then right it on a piece of paper.  Getting a dictionary that shows you the order of each stroke is good too.  As mentioned, learning strokes and radicals are essential, but I assume you know that since you've already learned it for 4 months

As for grammar, I think it is necessary for foreigners who couldn't do immersion to study grammar in order to learn a language.  However, I can't give you any good resources since I'm native Chinese.


----------



## Chinoise

I agree with viajero_canjeado's suggestion.  That's how I learned too.

The "practice sheet" can be easily done on MS Excel, not sure where you are in your level of Chinese, but I remember I started out with the simple characters like "big", "small", "people", "female", mixed with some characters that are a bit more complicated such as "I", "you", "he", "she"...etc.

The bilingual bible is a good idea too, especially it's stories that you've learned by heart.


----------



## hebe_o17

Hi there!

I have been studying Mandarin for one year, but still, I can't write chinese characters perfectly. Do you have any suggestion? Anything I can do to enhance my skills?

Xiè xiè nǐ! (thank you!)


----------



## xiaolijie

> Do you have any suggestion? Anything I can do to enhance my skills?


Practise and more practise, and love what you do!


----------



## love chinese

Imaging a square box when you write Chinese characters. In the beginning, your imaginery square box could be as big as 3"X3". You'll try to fill the entire box. Eventually your square box could be as small as a 1cmX1cm. 你的工夫就到家了。 祝你好运！！


----------



## dodoxemo

用田字格练习写汉字，加油！


----------



## hebe_o17

谢谢你.

I will do your suggestions.

战斗！


----------



## chinglish

I found this website http://www.zdic.net/ where they show you how to write in a 田字格, showing you the order of each stroke, also meaning of the character. Hope it helps


----------



## macrotis

Hi all,

I can recognize about a thousand characters but when it comes to reproduce them, I can't remember how to write more than half of them. It depends on the complexity of the character but I make stupid mistakes even in simple characters like 叫 as I usually forget which component comes first (I think, in this case, it is because 叫 and 收 interfere).

Do you have (or is there) a method to remember the strokes?


Sorry if this was discussed before but I tried a few searches on the forum with no success. Please give the link if there is a thread for it.


----------



## Rallino

macrotis said:


> Hi all,
> 
> I can recognize about a thousand characters but when it comes to reproduce them, I can't remember how to write more than half of them. It depends on the complexity of the character but I make stupid mistakes even in simple characters like 叫 as I usually forget which component comes first (I think, in this case, it is because 叫 and 收 interfere).
> 
> Do you have (or is there) a method to remember the strokes?
> 
> 
> Sorry if this was discussed before but I tried a few searches on the forum with no success. Please give the link if there is a thread for it.



Hello Macrotis 

I have studied Japanese for two and a half years, and maybe you know Japanese also uses Hanzi, only they call it Kanji. At first, I too, had had trouble memorising how to draw each and every stroke of all those 2000-ish characters, but eventually it came easier.

I haven't used any softwares to help me, I only used the books and books and, oh! Books! 

Here are a few rules that I followed, that I think, might also help you:

1. _*Never*_ try to learn a new word AND try to memorise its character at the same time.

2. I recommend that you do _*not*_ learn more than 15 characters, a day.

3. Don't practise the same characters everyday. Practise them randomly, i.e: 
> 1 hour after you've learnt
> The next day
> 3 days later
> Next week the same day
etc.

4. Make a list of "easily-confusable characters", such as: 待 - 侍 - 持 -特 - 寺, and study them together.

5. Write on little piece of papers all the words which you know the Hanzi for, and put them all in a box. Pick one randomly and try to write the Hanzi in 5 seconds. If you can't, put it on "to-be-practised list".

That's all I've come up with, right now. I hope these can help you, as they helped me. 

Good luck on your studies.


----------



## rarabara

hi,I saw that, as suggestion or as a guidance on one of chinese university's webpage that provides chinese course for foreigners.
they were mentioning (also underlining) that on daily basis,foreigners were suggested to learn 6 characters per day.

is this realistic ?
and what is the biggest number of your own word count on daily basis you learned?


----------



## Yichen

I think it depends.
It's hard for me to imagine how difficult it is for a non-native to remember all the strokes of a character.

"我们热爱学习"  The sentence consists of 6 characters. Is the sentence difficult?

It may be difficult to remember some single characters at first, but then you will find Chinese phrases are easier to remember!  For example, It's hard for a student who has learned English for a few months to use abstruse scientific words, but a student who learns Chinese can.

Let's have a look at the following two sentences:
"我们热爱学习"  (We love study)
"一年能学好汉语吗？" (Can one learn Chinese well in a year?)

The two sentences can provide us with many phrases:
热     （heat）
热能 （thermal energy）
热爱 （love, like something very much）
热学 （thermology ）
汉学 （The study of Chinese people and their Culture）
汉语   Chinese language
我们 （we）
学习   (study，learn）
爱     （love，like，be fond of, be interested in）
年     （year）
好     （good, well, OK, wonderful）
能     （can, be able to, ability, energy）
...

And we can also talk about some difficult issues:
我学热能 = I study thermology.
You see, "thermology" is a word too big for a student who just begins his English study, but it is possible for a Chinese beginner.


----------



## Jack12345

It is according to your aim and plan. 
For example, if you wanted to pass some exams, you could just study as the teacher's advices. If you wanted to speak in Chinese and learn it yourself, you could do more speaking and reading practices. 
And how long will you spend on learning it? 6 characters everyday means 180 characters a month and more than two thousands a year. I think it is very well for anyone who start to learn Chinese. Of course, I think it is difficult too. If I didn't make a mistake, Chinese children would study less than three thousand characters in 6 years.


----------



## rarabara

so,that is correct that they suggest. probably they experienced it. yes ,two thousand is not bad. because you will understand a newspaper written in chinese by this account of characters.

and...presumably they also included pronunciation. ok. but yes,regular study is needed.

thanks for your commenting.


----------



## Skatinginbc

A natural learning curve (like an epicurve of the coronavirus) follows a bell curve, increasing at a snail's pace before entering an exponential growth phase.   It may take several days to learn just one character at first, but after all the basics (e.g., 木 = "wood") are covered, you may acquire several new characters (e.g., 林 "woods", 森 "forest") in an hour.






maghanish2 said:


> foreigners were suggested to learn 6 characters per day.  is this realistic ?


It is overly ambitious for a beginner of course, but it may not be so if you have entered the exponential phase.


----------



## rarabara

hi once again @Jack12345 ,

but the plan is not clear here ,especially if we would like to judge the easeness or difficulty of the plan.
I have mathematics degree. this was not easy to complete,especially for someone. I do not say that I was studying too hard at my BSc. but there  are some instructions about it to make more clear explanation.

--->> at my BSc degree program I was commonly being known as someone who was more hardworking than medical faculty (medicine) students.
--->> to me,if we calculate the average amount of study at my BSc, I can say that I was studying less than 2 hours on daily basis (but average and everyday)
--->> some days I was doing nothing.
--->> some days I was studying more than 20 hours in a day.

...

quantities are useful to make more meaningful and&clear explanation.
so,how much hours on daily basis do we mention or do  they  imply when it is being suggested "6 caharcters per day"?


----------



## Jack12345

rarabara said:


> how much hours on daily basis do we mention or do they imply


It's hard to say because of the difference of everyone. If you just learned 6 characters, half or one hour was enough. But just to remember characters is not enough to learn language. Perhaps, you would spend more time to read, speak and look up dictionary at the beginning. It's based on yourself.
And whether you have a teacher or schoolmates to learn it together will also be helpful for you.


----------



## rarabara

yes, that seems meaningful.
meanwhile,I do not think that studying on strokes (phonetics of chinese (characters)) were difficult. conversely,I believe or think that is quite entertaning


----------



## IsaacDMQ

How many characters i must know in order to be fluent?


----------



## corner1912

Maybe 3000 characters is enough


----------



## rarabara

hi,

it is being said that 2.000 characters would be enough to understand a newspaper written in mandarin chinese but
may I ask;
how many characters do I need to write a patent document in chinese (mandarin)?
normally this will be filed to CNIPA, but in the current position I can't do this.
one another thing is that I was previously supposing that in case I know only writing characters (learning them by heart) would be almost nothing if I do not know the correct tonal pronunciation, but now I am suffering by that benefit.
to me learning just characters is way entertaining. but tonal (pronunciation) is problmeatic and I do not know how to cope with that.


----------



## Oswinw011

rarabara said:


> it is being said that 2.000 characters would be enough to understand a newspaper written in mandarin Chinese


It sounds like a tenuous theory to me. You might not take it at face value if you understand Chinese communicate with combinations of characters.



rarabara said:


> how many characters do I need to write a patent document in chinese (mandarin)?
> normally this will be filed to CNIPA, but in the current position I can't do this.


I haven't written a Chinese patent, but whenever I need to write an English patent, I would first go search some websites that provide basic words and syntax structures of relevant sentences. There are probably a few hundred words. So I guess the same can be true of the Chinese patent and you need to master a few hundred phrases to get your job done(I may get you wrong, because I don't know when you say characters, you refer to the compound characters or single character). Remember that compound words matter more--set phrases rather than some stand-alone characters are at play in your writing.

I'm no expert in pronunciation. I'd leave it to others.


----------



## SuperXW

rarabara said:


> one another thing is that I was previously supposing that in case I know only writing characters (learning them by heart) would be almost nothing if I do not know the correct tonal pronunciation, but now I am suffering by that benefit.
> to me learning just characters is way entertaining. but tonal (pronunciation) is problmeatic and I do not know how to cope with that.


I can hardly imagine how can one learn any language without knowing how to pronounce it...
I only know people who know pronunciations (how to speak) without writings (how to write)...


----------



## rarabara

Oswinw011 said:


> I haven't written a Chinese patent, but whenever I need to write an English patent, I would first go search some websites that provide basic words and syntax structures of relevant sentences. There are probably a few hundred words. So I guess the same can be true of the Chinese patent and you need to master a few hundred phrases to get your job done(I may get you wrong, because I don't know when you say characters, you refer to the compound characters or single character). Remember that compound words matter more--set phrases rather than some stand-alone characters are at play in your writing.
> 
> I'm no expert in pronunciation


I already wrote in english and it passed first controls.(Now it is in ISR phase)  (In fact, I have a seqeunce of applications or I will)
but china is very crowded so it might be effective to select CNIPA as entry country in the national phase of ePCT , thus I may consider even the use of translators but ePCT procedures might require more money. Just applications are also expensive and applications do not guarantee to be beholder of patents.

but in learning chinese language or in learning any langugae;

I think the plan is also effective. Although I prefer or tend to prefer working very hard in general, somethings are being well ordered obstacles/problems. Anyway, some of those problems will probably be achievements or I hope so. And I will eventually have to learn chinese. Or I feel so. Because patenting is important to me and this generally require high security in protection of that patentable product .


Oswinw011 said:


> It sounds like a tenuous theory to me. You might not take it at face value if you understand Chinese communicate with combinations of characters.



unfortunately I have not recognized this theory maybe this does not fall inside the scope of physics + mathematics (+Engineering).


----------



## rarabara

SuperXW said:


> can hardly imagine how can one learn any language without knowing how to pronounce it...


yes it is hard,because it might be either irrational or illogical. but possible. I think many indian people do not know how to pronunciate english well.



SuperXW said:


> I only know people who know pronunciations (how to speak) without writings (how to write)...


presumably these are original chinese people (or chinese in common)


----------



## IsaacDMQ

I'm a beginner. I want to know how many Chinese characters should I know in order to be fluent?


----------



## yuechu

Hi, IssacDMQ! People often say 1500-3000 to be able to understand most basic texts (newspapers, etc). In Chinese primary schools, children learn approximately 2500 characters.
Let's see what Chinese people say though...


----------



## IsaacDMQ

yuechu said:


> Hi, IssacDMQ! People often say 1500-3000 to be able to understand most basic texts (newspapers, etc). Let's see what Chinese people say though...


Thanks yuechu.let's then wait what say chinese people.


----------



## Huanhuan04

maghanish2 said:


> Hello everyone!
> 
> I am very interested in learning Chinese.  However, I don't want to just start off with the grammar and learning all the rules of the language.  First, I would like to become familiar with writing and pronouncing many of the symbols of Chinese.
> 
> What I am looking for is a website that provides, for example, one new Chinese word per day, with the symbol and how to say it.  Preferably, I would like an animated picture of how to write the symbol (stroke order).
> 
> If anyone knows about a site like this, it would be greatly appreciated!  I very much want to learn this amazing language!



Stroke order is quite a challenge thing even for Chinese students because the official guide has been changed twice or three times since 1980. I would recommend to follow up with the common rules and check out some other special ones.

You can also use the online website to check the stoke order. It's in mandarin only.
汉字笔顺规则口诀 - 笔顺网


----------



## rarabara

IsaacDMQ said:


> I'm a beginner. I want to know how many Chinese characters should I know in order to be fluent?


as far as I know,you will be able to understand a newspaper which was written in chinese if you learn 2000 characters.


----------



## radagasty

rarabara said:


> you will be able to understand a newspaper which was written in chinese if you learn 2000 characters.


The problem with this type of statistics, though, is that, whilst perhaps comforting, they may somewhat misleading.

Consider the following claims, which I found randomly on the internet:



> With *2,500 characters* you can read *97.97 %* of everyday written language.
> With *3,500 characters* you can read up to *99.48 %*, which means pretty much everything!
> It’s even more comforting to know that with only *900 characters*, you can actually read *90%* of a newspaper!



I won't mention the source, since it is not the numbers themselves that are important, but the accompanying claims.

What does it mean that you can read 97.97% of everyday written language with 2,500 characters? Well... it means that you will encounter one unknown character every for 50 you read. With 3,500 characters, this goes down to one in every 200. Not bad!

However, it is misleading to claim that “with only *900 characters*, you can actually read *90%* of a newspaper!” Well... by definition, news is novel, so you won't have much context to go on, and even if you can read 90% of the words in it, I'll warrant that you won't get much of the article, since much of the news content will be expressed in the 10% of unfamiliar words.

At any rate, in order to read a Chinese newspaper comfortably, I suspect 3,500 characters is closer to the mark than 2,000.


----------



## rarabara

radagasty said:


> The problem with this type of statistics, though, is that, whilst perhaps comforting, they may somewhat misleading.
> 
> Consider the following claims, which I found randomly on the internet:
> 
> 
> 
> I won't mention the source, since it is not the numbers themselves that are important, but the accompanying claims.
> 
> What does it mean that you can read 97.97% of everyday written language with 2,500 characters? Well... it means that you will encounter one unknown character every for 50 you read. With 3,500 characters, this goes down to one in every 200. Not bad!
> 
> However, it is misleading to claim that “with only *900 characters*, you can actually read *90%* of a newspaper!” Well... by definition, news is novel, so you won't have much context to go on, and even if you can read 90% of the words in it, I'll warrant that you won't get much of the article, since much of the news content will be expressed in the 10% of unfamiliar words.
> 
> At any rate, in order to read a Chinese newspaper comfortably, I suspect 3,500 characters is closer to the mark than 2,000.


hi,  
this text does not seem like it had been written randomly. presumably you have experienced the content.
All in all ,although I have no profession in cninese, I am currently educationalist at the same time with concentrating on scientific contexts. 
so,what I say is that in spite of high potentiality for this quotation to be valid and correct, I think encouragement will worth in learning anything. Therefore, I only preferred to write positive (encouraging) context .

Thanks for your contribution
Regards,
rarabara


----------



## Yichen

Usually, characters are different from phrases in Chinese. I have no idea how many characters I learned in my primary school years. Maybe the character lists on those textbooks can tell me. To be frank, seldom would a Chinese student above junior high school spend time learning Chinese characters specifically. I am not too sure about how many characters are needed to make up the vocabulary a person needs in order to meet his/her daily life or professional work requirements.


----------



## Staarkali

Hi all,




radagasty said:


> The problem with this type of statistics, though, is that, whilst perhaps comforting, they may somewhat misleading.
> [...]
> However, it is misleading to claim that “with only *900 characters*, you can actually read *90%* of a newspaper!” Well... by definition, news is novel, so you won't have much context to go on, and even if you can read 90% of the words in it, I'll warrant that you won't get much of the article, since much of the news content will be expressed in the 10% of unfamiliar words.


I am fluent in Chinese and I cannot but agree with radagasty. Even in a text where you are missing only one characters, you may not fully grasp the core meaning, let alone the subtleties.



radagasty said:


> At any rate, in order to read a Chinese newspaper comfortably, I suspect 3,500 characters is closer to the mark than 2,000.


Agreed again : in order to be fully at ease with the newspaper or books for general audience, i'll say at least 3k - 3.5k. Less than that and it will be common not to full grasp the meaning.

My two cents.


----------



## dojibear

.


IsaacDMQ said:


> I'm a beginner. I want to know how many Chinese characters should I know in order to be fluent?


Note the difference between Chinese characters and words. Each character is 1 syllable. But 80% of Chinese words are 2-syllable, not 1 syllable. Your goal is learning words (and sentences and grammar), not syllables.

You may know a character that is used in 50 different words, but you only know 4 of those words. Does reading a newspaper require knowing the most common 3000 characters, or the most common 3000 words?


----------



## twenty6

With 3000 characters you probably won't be able to understand newspaper articles, I'd say somewhere around 4-5000 (3000 would be more suited for something like an elementary school history textbook or something).

3000 words is another matter; with that you probably _will_ be able to read most (if not all) of a newspaper article, it all depends on the word choice of the author.

Oftentimes "characters" and "words" are confused and used interchangeably, which makes it a lot more confusing.

By my estimates, only around 2000 words are required for day-to-day life in China (even less if you're an introvert and avoid social encounters). If you learn 10-20 ish words a week (which is very easy, from my experiences), and practice a bit every day, you can learn enough to pass the HSK 4/5 tests in 3-5 years, which are the general authority on one's Chinese skill. If you want to be an intellectual, I'd say around 4000 words.


----------



## radagasty

dojibear said:


> You may know a character that is used in 50 different words, but you only know 4 of those words. Does reading a newspaper require knowing the most common 3000 characters, or the most common 3000 words?



Certainly 3,000 characters. Knowledge of 3,000 words would be nowhere near enough to be able to read a newspaper. It has been estimated that native speakers of English know on average 40,000 words, depending on their level of education, and I think a similar figure would apply for Chinese.

It has been estimated that, in modern Chinese society, a total of around 7,000 characters are in use, although, depending on their level of education, most people might perhaps know only 5,000.



twenty6 said:


> With 3000 characters you probably won't be able to understand newspaper articles, I'd say somewhere around 4-5000 (3000 would be more suited for something like an elementary school history textbook or something).
> 
> 3000 words is another matter; with that you probably _will_ be able to read most (if not all) of a newspaper article, it all depends on the word choice of the author.



I think this is altogether incorrect. Surely, logic suggests that one should know more words than characters. After all, for the most part, every character itself constitutes a word, apart from a very few words like 蜘蛛 or 蝴蝶, where the two parts of the word don't have any independent meaning.


----------



## twenty6

radagasty said:


> Knowledge of 3,000 words would be nowhere near enough to be able to read a newspaper.


Then according to you, one would need around 4-5000 words to read a newspaper, no? If one character=one word then my estimate is correct by your standards.

Perhaps my interpretation of "characters" is wrong, but my point is that 3000 characters is not enough to understand a newspaper article.

I myself, when I knew about some 3000 words (some 4 years ago), could roughly understand some newspaper articles. As said, it depends on word choice.


----------



## radagasty

twenty6 said:


> Then according to you, one would need around 4-5000 words to read a newspaper, no? If one character=one word then my estimate is correct by your standards. Perhaps my interpretation of "characters" is wrong, but my point is that 3000 characters is not enough to understand a newspaper article.



I think it is rather the definition of ‘word’ that might be problematic. (And indeed, the notion of a _word_ is not well-defined in linguistics.)

Character = 字, and is a unit of writing, usually rather well defined, since each character typically gets its own square space in print. Thus, 檳, 榔, 樂, 樹 and 懶 are all characters. 樹 and 懶 are themselves also words, meaning ‘tree’ and ‘lazy’ respectively, as is the combination 樹懶 ‘sloth’. Then, there are characters that can represent more than one word, e.g., 樂, which is used to write three different words: ‘happy’, ‘music’ and ‘to love’. Finally, there are characters that do not by themselves represent words, _e.g._, 檳 and 榔, because each one has no meaning by itself; together, though, they constitute a disyllabic word 檳榔 meaning ‘betel’, and 檳榔樹 is a trisyllabic word meaning ‘betel palm’.

Thus, it is not really the case that ‘one character=one word’. Most characters do constitute words by themselves, but there are many more words that are composed of two or more characters. My point was that 3,000 characters may be sufficient to read a newspaper (at a basic level), but one would need to know many more words (formed from these characters), certainly no fewer than 10,000.



twenty6 said:


> I myself, when I knew about some 3000 words (some 4 years ago), could roughly understand some newspaper articles.



May I ask how you measured the number of words you knew? I mean, have no idea how many words I know, either in English or in Chinese. And, if as your tag indicates, you are a native speaker of Chinese, you should certainly have known/know a lot more than 3,000 words. I suppose (and this is just a stab in the dark) that a child starting primary school would already have learnt that many words, even if he doesn't know how to write them.


----------



## twenty6

radagasty said:


> Character = 字, and is a unit of writing, usually rather well defined, since each character typically gets its own square space in print.


I see. Never paid much attention to specific technicalities   

Now: let's say one needs 10,000 characters to read a newspaper. 

If (this is a guess) 1/2 of the words were one character, 1/3 were two character, and 1/6 were three character, that would be 166 characters for 100 words, which means for a 10,000 character newspaper one would need to know 6024 words. That's too much. I'm not even sure if my Chinese dictionary has 7000 words. I'd put my estimate at 5000 words.


radagasty said:


> May I ask how you measured the number of words you knew?


There are estimates that one needs 2000-3000 words for daily life in China; I can make conversation in Chinese fairly easily, so a 3000 word estimate is probably not that inaccurate. 

Of course, it is hard to estimate such things.


----------



## dojibear

radagasty said:


> My point was that 3,000 characters may be sufficient to read a newspaper (at a basic level), but one would need to know many more words (formed from these characters), certainly no fewer than 10,000.


That sounds realistic to me.

And that points out the major difference between native speakers and foreign learners. A native speaker is fluent in the spoken language by age 5 or 6. They may already know 10,000 words. What they learn in school is how to read and write those words, using less than 3,000 characters.

A foreigner doesn't know those words. For them, 2,000 characters may be 5,000 words, but it isn't 10,000 words. And it isn't the most common words in newspapers.

For example, I learned 天 long ago. Later, I learned 10 or so other 天 words. But my Chinese program (Wenlin 4) shows hundreds of words using 天. I don't know those words. I might guess that 天气 means "weather", and it's clear that 今天means "today", but if I see 天井 in a newspaper, I won't know it means "courtyard".



radagasty said:


> I think it is rather the definition of ‘word’ that might be problematic.


The definitions seem similar in English and Mandarin. In Mandarin writing, each character is a syllable. Most of the characters are also 1-syllable words, but 80% of Mandarin words are 2-syllable words.


----------



## Yichen

I agree with dojibear.
Chinese characters have stong abilities to coin new words, and it is at least a place where Chinese and English differ. In many cases, a character may either be a character or a word.
We can use a character to construct a long list of words in most cases, but it does not necessarily mean we know them exactly. To be frank, I feel it easier to guess or figure out the meaning of a Chinese word than an English one.

This is a link for words containing 天：包含天的字词
(I believe some words in the link are nonsensical, though)

Here is "天井". It is not easily seen nowadays.


----------



## radagasty

twenty6 said:


> Now: let's say one needs 10,000 characters to read a newspaper. If (this is a guess) 1/2 of the words were one character, 1/3 were two character, and 1/6 were three character, that would be 166 characters for 100 words, which means for a 10,000 character newspaper one would need to know 6024 words. That's too much. I'm not even sure if my Chinese dictionary has 7000 words. I'd put my estimate at 5000 words.



This makes zero sense to me. Can anyone else make heads or tails of these calculations?

In any case, unless it is for learners or primary-school students, I find it hard to believe that your Chinese dictionary has so few entries. When it comes to Chinese dictionaries, one must distinguish between character dictionaries (字典) and word dictionaries (辭典). The former are focussed on characters along, and usually only list examples of words using the character. The latter list words, usually grouped under their first character, and do try to be exhaustive (commensurate with the overall size of the dictionary).

The hand-sized bilingual dictionary that I keep on my desk (遠東漢英大辭典–簡明本) lists, according to the fore-matter, some 120,000 entries under 7,331 characters. Now, granted, not all of these entries are ‘words’ as such, as the dictionary also includes expressions and 成語, but the vast majority of them are, and I would say that there are at least 100,000 words in the dictionary. Note that this is an abridged version of the full dictionary, which would have many more entries (and which I also own, but don't have to hand at the moment). And because this dictionary doesn't have Cantonese readings, I also use a pocket-sized character-dictionary (中文字典) published by the 香港華僑語文出版社, ostensibly compiled for the children of Chinese emigrants, which contains about 9,000 characters, with their Cantonese pronunciations.



twenty6 said:


> There are estimates that one needs 2000-3000 words for daily life in China; I can make conversation in Chinese fairly easily, so a 3000 word estimate is probably not that inaccurate.



This estimate beggars belief, I have to say. Are we referring to daily life out in a farming village in rural China? Does this include reading a newspaper, or official notices from the government? I really don't see how one can get by knowing so few words, especially in modern society, and certainly, if you are a native (or background) speaker, I would say you know many more words than this.


----------



## dojibear

Another problem with newspapers is the "drop-off problem". Many major languages (English, Mandarin, others) have this problem. This was explained by polyglot Steve Kaufmann, and was discovered by computer research at a University.

The problem is this: there is a core of very-frequent words (500-800 of them). After that, word frequency drops off rapidly. A language does not have a core of 3000 words, with most sentences use *only *those words. Instead, there is a core of 800 words and most sentence use those 800 words *plus *a few less-common words.

Steve's suggestion for learning a new language is "topics". There are hundreds of topics (ballet, basketball, space travel, trains, riots, music, cooking, hobbies...). But each topic has a set of 20-60 common words. If you read about the same topic, you see the same words over and over.

The problem with newspapers is that each article is about a new topic. So each article uses several uncommon words (in addition to the 800 core words). Newspapers cannot restrict themselves to 3000 words.

I see this a lot. For reading practice I use [thechairmanbao.com], which is like a simple newspaper - daily short articles graded HSK1 to HSK6. I've completed a HSK2 course, so I could read every word in today's HSK2 article about lunches, except the word 艺术品. Another HSK2 article (less than 100 words) had 庙会, 摊, 租, 馍 in it.


----------



## twenty6

> radagasty said:
> This makes zero sense to me. Can anyone else make heads or tails of these calculations?


As I said, these are all random estimations. It's extremely hard to estimate anything in any language. These are merely generated from common consensus on various websites (i.e. Baidu). While estimates can vary from person to person, they're all within some 4000-5000 words to read a newspaper (there was a question on the Baidu Zhidao forums, which asked how many words one needs to know to read a newspaper). From that, at the very very most one knows 8000 words.

And as you said, it is estimated that there are around 7000 characters in use. And concerning the dictionary, I'm using the all-Chinese version of the 新华字典，twelfth edition. There are some 600 pages of entries, and at the very most one page has 19 words. That makes 11,400 words in total, and many of them are special-use (for describing a very specific thing or that can only be used in a specific situation, i.e. the entry for 那, which is a surname; 嫪, which is also a surname; 橄 and 榄，which can only be used with each other (as far as know) and have separate entries. Since when will you use those?

滈 is the name of a river, 鄗 was the name of a county (historically), 镐 was the name of the western Zhou dynasty's capital, 皞 means “月亮” （no other explanation provided), 颢 means "white" (as an adjective). These are all on the same page (page 181, to be exact), and only under very specific circumstances can I think of any use for them.

100,000 words for a pocket dictionary is way too much. Considering it's a bilingual dictionary (unless it's a translation guide), it should be much longer than the all-Chinese version.



> radagasty said:
> This estimate beggars belief, I have to say.


For daily life, small conversation, etc. With 3000 words one can certainly live in China; this is a rather small estimate. And, as I said, that was from 4 years ago, and now I estimate I know somewhere around 4500.


I feel that our information comes from very contradictory sources...

HOWEVER: considering your dictionary is in Cantonese, there might be differences, since what I am referencing is in Mandarin.


----------



## Giuseppe Romanazzi

IsaacDMQ said:


> I'm a beginner. I want to know how many Chinese characters should I know in order to be fluent?


Actually, you never know everything, never.

You have to go on learning, but I'm sure about the most efficient way to start:
START FROM THE MOST COMMONLY USED CHARACTERS.

Illustrious people and institutions have proven it over and over again. For example:

- 1988, The National Working Committee on Languages and Writing Systems of China;
- 1988, The Ministry of Education of China;
- 1996, Tsai;
- 1998, Da;
- 1998, He;
- 1999, Beijing Language and Culture University;
- 2002, Peking University;
- 2002, Tsinghua University;
- 2004, Jun Da...

They studied a huge quantity of modern fiction's dialogues, as well as news reports, articles, books, websites, etc...

What did they find? They found that only *1 single character, the most frequently used, makes up as much as 4%* of all spoken and written Chinese language; only *6 characters make 10%* of the usage of Chinese language; only *152 characters make up 50%* of whatever you say, listen or read in Chinese; only *1,000 characters make up over 89%* of the usage of Chinese.

My advice is to focus your effort and time on those characters. And then, only later, go on with all the others. Because, as correctly said by radagasty, dojibear, twenty6, and others, yes, you need to go on learning.


----------



## dojibear

Caution: sometimes the question changes the answer. If the question is "how many characters?", the answer is a number of characters. That is the question Isaac asked, and all these studies researched the number of characters. That does not mean that "number of characters" is the best way to measure learning. 

If you are learning Chinese, that is an important question. How do you measure learning? The number of memorized characters? In my opinion, the number of words you know is more important, just like it is in English and Spanish. Being able to read a character (that is common in newspapers) does not imply knowing the 10 (or 75) words that use that character. I don't care how many different characters are in a newspaper, if I cannot read that newspaper.

I think beginners need to learn words first (not characters). Just like Chinese students, they can learn pinyin rapidly. By the time you've learned the sounds of Chinese, you know pinyin. Then the beginner can learn some common words and basic grammar. A beginner is more likely to quit if they have to memorize many characters just to learn some basic sentences. Some people love memorizing, but a lot of people don't.

After all, Chinese elementary school students (fluent in spoken Chinese, expert in pinyin) only learn about 400 characters each year in school. Are you "smarter than a 5th grader", if that 5th grader is in Beijing? I'm not!


----------



## Giuseppe Romanazzi

dojibear said:


> A beginner is more likely to quit if they have to memorize many characters just to learn some basic sentences. Some people love memorizing, but a lot of people don't.


I do agree! If you just need to become fluent, characters (and corresponding WRITTEN words) can safely be ignored. In Beijing, when I started to learn Chinese on 2000, I even had nightmares of Chinese characters assaulting and trying to eat me! Seriously. And became bald. All my hair on the streets of Beijing 

God save pinyin!


----------

