How many Chinese characters do you need to know? (to READ Chinese)

a lot of people will ask how many characters do you need to read Chinese but if you Google this question on the internet you'll get wildly different answers from some sources I'll tell you just 500 characters is all you need to understand 75 written Chinese to others I'll say two thousand twenty five hundred or three thousand or more are required to be truly literate today I want to give you my two cents on what I think is the correct answer to this question and be sure to stick around until the end of the video when I explain why none of this even matters so if you're new here you might not know my story I'm ethically Chinese but I grew up here in the United States and Chinese was my first language until I started learning English at six years old I was always able to speak Chinese just fine but it also meant that my Chinese abilities kind of got stuck at a six-year-old's level I started relearning Chinese in college which at that point I could only read like a few hundred characters but now in 2023 I feel like I finally reached a point where I don't feel a pressure to learn any more characters because I can read just about anything on the internet and understand 99 of what's going on so I wanted to make this video to share with you all the Milestones that got me here where I am today before I forget about them your first Milestone is certainly your first 100 characters like my first 100 subscribers on YouTube the process is slow and tedious you don't know what you're doing it's just a grind unfortunately I don't remember when I learned my first 100 characters because I was a wee little child back then so no words of wisdom from me well the next logical step would be 500 characters and I don't really like this Milestone because to me it's nothing but a pretty number a lot of websites will tell you how much Chinese you can read with just 500 characters but don't be fooled there's not much of a difference between 100 and 500 characters you're still not going to be reading anything other than very easy children's books and educational material that's specifically written for your level but but this next Milestone is actually super important to me and it may be for you as well and that magic number is 750 or just somewhere between 700 and 800. see when I reach this point something amazing happened I started noticing patterns and similarities between characters and one of the first character pairs I noticed this with was Shea and dway I thought to myself these characters look almost identical and they're pronounced kind of similar too so that's when I started picking up on the patterns and characters see before then every new character I Learned was just a completely new and completely unique symbol that I just had to memorize but after you get to this point there will be enough characters that you start noticing these patterns you'll start to understand how characters are built you'll start understanding the semantic and The Fanatic components of characters that they're not completely random and if you want to learn more about how characters are constructed and how understanding that can help you learn Chinese faster I will definitely make a future video on this topic and it will be linked in the description down below but the best part about this Milestone is that learning Chinese characters will actually get easier from this point on so if you are a beginner and you're struggling with Chinese characters just aim for the 750 mark because if you can reach that point the hardest parts will be behind you once you get to that 1000 mark this is where things get exciting because at this point you'll start to be able to read easy text and carry simple conversations with real people and I get it many of you guys who are learning Chinese you don't live in China you don't have the environment and you don't have somebody to practice with you in real life but thanks to the internet you can find over 1 000 native Chinese Teachers on italki who can help you improve your Chinese with personalized one-on-one lessons whether you want to work on listening speaking or reading and writing there's a teacher who can help you do that and this is especially valuable if you are at that 1000 character Mark where you know enough words to begin communicating but maybe you just never had to practice or you lack the confidence this is honestly where I am with Kareem in right now I've casually learned it for a few years but I can't carry a conversation luckily italki offers over 150 different languages so let me show you how easy it is to book a lesson with italki it's as simple as selecting your language what you want to work on during your lesson your lesson time the language your teacher speaks where your teachers from and you can also choose between professional teachers and Community tutors as well as a price range that fits your budget once you find a teacher you like just press Book lesson choose the type of lesson you want at a time that works for you and you're all done foreign [Music] the best thing about italki is the real practice you get the real interaction with real people and it's flexible too this means no commitment no subscription and you only pay for the lessons that you need one-on-one lessons on italki started just five dollars and if you spend ten dollars or more you can save an additional five dollars if you use my exclusive promo code ABC 5. this promo is only available to the first 50 people who sign up so make sure you check out italki today and let me know how you enjoyed your lesson so back to our 1000 character Milestone at this point you'll start to be able to read easy children's books even if you have to look up a lot of characters you'll start to be able to carry simple text conversations over WeChat as long as the other person keeps it really simple this was a cool milestone for me personally because it meant I could start texting my relatives in China without having to Auto translate every single line or resorting to voice messages at 1500 characters you'll have learned enough to be able to read easy children's books as long as it's not above a first grader's level and as long as they're not fairy tales with really specialty vocabulary you'll be able to understand ninety percent of WeChat conversations again providing the other person is not talking about Advanced topics at 2 000 characters you finally made it to the big leagues now at this point you can comfortably read WeChat conversations comfortably read children's stories as long as they're not ma Hua the thing with man Hua is a lot of them are written for teenagers and those will use Advanced vocabulary and at this point you can start to read newspapers web pages and to be clear you will still struggle you will need a dictionary but you can get the general gist of it so if I were to answer the question how many characters do you need to read Chinese I would say at least 2 000 but that's not the complete answer and I'll explain why in a bit at 2500 characters you would have learned enough to be able to pass hsk 6 and at this point reading everything across the board will be a lot easier for you text conversations are no problem you'll be able to understand 95 of news articles and you'll start to be able to read young adult novels and if it sounds like I'm implying that novels are more difficult to read than news articles it's because they are on the hsk website they say that if you pass h6k6 you should be able to read novels no it does not say that anywhere on the website hey it's editor Andrew here honestly I'm not sure what I was referring to and I apologize for that but the point I was trying to make is that people tend to overestimate hsk 6 like in most novels are written for a high school level but hsk 6 will only put you like in the middle of elementary school and that's if we don't consider the speaking aspect of it I'll show you a sample from a fourth grade textbook here in a second so let's get back into the video finally at 3 000 characters you would have reached the level similar to a middle school Chinese student theoretically anyways at 3 500 characters you would have reached a level similar to an average high school student now I can't really speak on these levels because I'm not there yet so I took a test online that estimates how many Chinese characters you know and my results came out somewhere around 2 800 and if I were to honestly assess myself I would say that my Chinese reading level is similar to that of a fourth grader but what I will say is that hsk 2.0 ends at 2500 characters and I think that's a perfect point to end at because in my experience after you get to that point you'll be able to understand 95 of anything that you could possibly encounter and for me personally my drive to learn more characters kind of diminished after that point because it's enough to get by but and this is a big but there's a problem to all of this all of what I told you is true assuming you know an equivalent amount of words as you do characters because a character in Chinese is not necessarily a word and Mandarin Chinese is heavily reliant on multi-character words so it doesn't matter if you can read individual characters if you don't know the words they're a part of and sometimes you can't even pronounce the character correctly if you don't know the word of the part of for example this character da it means big even beginners know that but if you saw in this word you'd be incorrect to say instead the correct pronunciation is daifu and it's a term for doctor so truthfully how many characters do I need to read Chinese is the wrong question to ask what you need to be asking is how many words do I need to read Chinese how many words do I need to communicate in Chinese but it's quite frustrating because all over the internet people gloss over this fact even Chinese people themselves will only talk about how many characters they know and they'll never talk about how many words they know the only thing I found online about the vocabulary size of a native Chinese speaker was this questionable article from basically Chinese quora where this person claimed that a native speaker and not just Chinese but also English will know between forty thousand and sixty thousand words now I find this a little questionable because according to this website's estimate I only know eighteen thousand English words but then again they also say that a native English speakers should know twenty thousand to thirty thousand so maybe I'm just illiterate but I guess the reason nobody talks about it is because it's really difficult to estimate the number of words you know just look at the wide range of numbers you get when asking how many words a native speaker should know from 15 000 all the way up to sixty thousand but the good thing is the number of words you need to communicate in any language are all roughly the same a few thousand for basic conversation and around ten thousand to be fluent something to keep in mind when learning Chinese though is that you typically don't learn characters and words at the same rate so I made a little graph to help explain this on the x-axis is the number of characters you know or you can think of it as your Learning Journey on the y-axis is the ratio of characters that you know to words that you know so when you first start out learning Chinese there's roughly a one-to-one ratio meaning when you learn your first 100 characters you will know 100 words but this Gap will start to widen as you learn words at a faster rate than you will learn characters and this is because you will start learning compound words that take advantage of characters you already know as well as alternative definitions of characters you already know so let's say by the time you get to 1 000 characters you would have learned two thousand words a one to two ratio and this Gap will continue to widen because the most common characters have a ton of usages they can be used in a lot of compound words and they have a lot of alternative definitions eventually though it'll fall because you'll be only left with rare characters that don't have a lot of usages after all that's part of what makes them rare and just for fun I made another curve that shows what a native speaker's learning curve might look like so because native speakers will already know how to speak the language before they learn how to read and write it this Curve will start off very high but eventually it'll dip and follow a similar trajectory to a Chinese learners but it's also probable that native speakers will know more words per character than Chinese Learners simply because they're immersed in the language and use it a lot more so the moral of the story is aim for 750 characters before you decide to give up but most importantly focus on Words and learning to communicate in the language instead of how many characters you know and don't forget to take advantage of that italki offer to get five dollars off of your lesson with the code abc5 now this video is just my opinion based on my experience to answer the question how many characters you need to read Chinese but I wonder if there could be a scientific way to answer this question a data-driven method to decide once and for all if 500 characters is all you need to understand 75 percent of written Chinese I wonder [Music]

Channel: ABChinese

Views: 43,399

Keywords: how many chinese characters should I learn, how many chinese characters do I need, hanzi

Id: avAp1A1FtZ4

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2023