| 2000-3000 characters and I can read chinese???? | |
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| Mar 11, 2007 08:35 |   |
 | I often hear that if I learn around 2000-3000 characters it's all I'd ever need to read most things - is there anywhere on the net to find the most commonly used characters? or must I study a dictionary (not very appealing)! |
| Mar 11, 2007 20:29 | #1 |
| I'm always sceptical about such claims. But relax, there's no need to memorise a dictionary. In fact, that's probably counter-productive. Let me see what online resources I have bookmarked: http://www.chinese-forums.com/ http://www.chineseblast.com/ http://us.dict.cn/ http://sinoling.com/ http://internationalscientific.org/ http://www.xuezhongwen.net/ http://www.hanyu.com.cn/ http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/ http://www.zhongwen.com/ http://www.chinasite.com/ http://www.mandarintools.com/ http://www.zdic.net/ http://textbook.adsotrans.com/ Some of those will be more useful than others. Some are just dictionaries, others offer links to more resources. The last one, newsinchinese, is a kind of guided reading of Chinese new articles. Don't mean to seem like I'm spamming the site with all these links. I have no connection to any of them. Feel free to browse and see which ones are useful to you. |
| Mar 12, 2007 07:54 | #2 |
| And one more I just found: http://www.activechinese.com/ Although, considering they have a button on the front page saying 'free trial', you might have to pay to get anything useful out of it. |
| Mar 12, 2007 23:46 | #3 |
| Yes, I have seen those same figures quoted.....and also in the 3,000 to 5,000 range too. These are just averages, but most likely somewhat in the ball park. It would be interesting to hear from our native Chinese language speakers, with regard to their feeling on this aspect ??? |
| Mar 13, 2007 03:07 | #4 |
| I don't know exactly. I never count the characters I can read. LOL |
| Apr 4, 2007 11:41 | #5 |
| I found this link a little while ago for myself, which I believe answers exactly your question: http://www.zein.se/ If you cannot get the link to work try google search for: "The most common Chinese characters in order of frequency" the above site should be No1 hit. |
| Apr 6, 2007 05:27 | #6 |
| What about a link to popular Chinese idioms? Many characters (3-5) combine together to form a single meaning???? |
| Oct 10, 2007 20:21 | #7 |
| GUEST12220 | Knowing a certain amount of characters does not imply knowing how to read chinese. Although it is true that the root of chinese characters were at once associated to various physical objects and drawn accordingly to represent them, characters in the modern sense are now mostly phonetic in nature which have evolved over many centuries. Therefore knowing the meaning of a character does not necessarily mean you can extract the meaning of the word it is trying to communicate. Most modern chinese words are formed using two or more characters in which each character phonetically representing the sound of the word. for exambe the word "mashang" means "immediately" the "ma" character used means "horse", the "shang" character means "on". On careful review it seems logical to think that "horse on" would mean "immediately" however without knowing the prior bit of information one who simply knows the individual meaning of the character would have most probably misinterpreted the true meaning of "horse on". eg, Wo yao mashang qu. literal translation is "I want horse on go". Without knowing that mashang=immediately (in the modern sense), the reader could have been led to understand, "I want to go by horse" instead of "I want to immediately go" and missed the intended meaning altogether. Therefore knowing a fixed amount of character will NOT enable you to READ chinese. In order to read chinese you need to know the individual meaning but more importantly you need to know the meaning of the combinations.. this is the key to reading chinese. So to quote the great John DeFrancis, one should ask "how many combinations of characters do you know rather than how many individual character you know" Cheers! |
| Oct 15, 2007 01:31 | #8 |
| GUEST25181 | 大家好，我来自中国 hi everyone , i come from china , chinese native speaker, if you have any trouble , you can write to me on gmail.com|tungshunghwa |
| Feb 16, 2011 13:31 | #9 |
| GUEST14742 | I have learned about 2,200 Japanese characters to read Japanese. Knowing 2,0000 characters makes it VERY easy to learn new words in Japanese, and I am currently learning Chinese characters. Knowing them has made Chinese MUCH MUCH easier. Although it's hard to put a number on it, knowing at least 2,000 characters makes life MUCH easier for studying Chinese. Whether it is learning vocabulary, reading, or even learning grammar, knowing the characters levels the playing field SO MUCH to your advantage. |
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