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

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✍️ I'm a native speaker who learned to read Chinese later in life. Here's what you'll be able to read at each milestone, from 100 characters to 2500 and beyond. (based on my experience:) How many characters do you need to read Chinese?
📍TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 || Why I'm making this video
1:06 || 100~500 characters
1:50 || The Magic Number
3:07 || 1000 characters + italki
5:53 || 1500~3500 characters
8:34 || BUT, there's a catch...
10:34 || Learning curves of characters vs words
Learn about the difference between characters and words in Chinese!
▶️ Why Chinese HATES 1 Syllable Words: • Why Chinese HATES 1 Sy...
▶️ Why is Chinese OBSESSED with 2 Syllable Words?: • Why is Chinese OBSESSE...
▶️ Why Chinese Verbs NEED an Object: • Why Chinese Verbs NEED...
⚠️ NOTES:
1) I consider HSK 6 to be equivalent to native 3rd grade. The content is different though. An adult at HSK 6 would function better in society, but wouldn't know all the literature that the 3rd grader knows. Yes, in China, they read ancient poems from even 1st grade.
2) You may have noticed the native speaker's curve moves sharply up after 2000 characters (11:55). This reflects the large amounts of vocabulary (words) that students learn in late elementary school through high school. By second grade, students are already expected to know 1600 characters, but by the end of 6th grade, that number only goes up to 3000, and to just over 3500 by high school graduation.
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@Italkilanguage ​

[@ABChinese]

✅ Learn 150+ languages with quality native-speaking teachers on italki.🎉 Buy $10 get $5 off your first lesson using my code: ABC5 Web: go.italki.com/abchinese2023 App: italki.app.link/abchinese2023 Wanna test your English or Chinese? 😂 These are the tests I used: English: preply.com/en/learn/english/test-your-vocab 中文: hanzitest.ericjiang.com

[@lucasroceli9197]

For curiosity, this statistics of 500 = 75%, 1000 = 89%, 2000 = 97% are based in the Jun Da Character frequency list. This list is formed by a huge data from texts on the internet, books, movies, etc. The character 的 is the most frequent, it appears 3.244.537 times.

[@your-mom-irl]

75% of characters doesnt translate to 75% of texts tho, if you dont know 1 in every 4 characters you are probably not going to understand much.

[@MusicLingoZhenrui]

As a Chinese native speaker, just did the test in both English and Chinese, I know 5800 Chinese characters, and 9658 English words.

[@defyious1769]

Singaporean chinese with only 2800 for chinese and somehow 21k for english

[@jmjt3709]

Singaporean Chinese, still regularly working at my Chinese beyond my school years, 4000 Chinese characters, and 25k for English. I consider myself fluent in English, can-read-but-can't-express in Chinese.

[@umihikari5199]

the milestone where a learner start noticing that Chinese characters are formed from radicals varies from people to people. For me, after 100 words, I started to notice that those characters were just combination of some repeated elements. Then I started searching and got to know that there are around 214 radicals, learning all of which helps much memorise characters and words.

[@quexybompq]

I found when I hit around 2800 (traditional) characters, the ratio for new words to new characters changed quite significantly, it gets very satisfying when so many new words are just two old words glued together. I'm now at ~3300 characters (8600 words) which apparently puts me around the level of a grade 6 kid 🤓 I still miss a lot of details reading YA novels though... 😅

[@electablebee]

Do you mind me asking where you find your learning material? At the moment I’m using an online tutor

[@quexybompq]

@@electablebee I learnt most of my vocabulary from reading books, starting with really basic kids books. I am living in Taiwan, so it's easy to find them in person. I think the big bookstore chain eslite ships internationally? (but I don't know about simplified Chinese though). I first did a year of intensive Mandarin at a language centre here, and I don't think I'd have been able to learn from books without first doing that, definitely didn't learn it all from books alone

[@enricobrasil]

In Linguistics people say a native speaker knows about 20k-60k root words in one's mother language. 20k would be the "active" vocabulary (the words the person does speak in daily life) plus 40k "passive" vocabulary (the person knows the words but don't use them daily). About HSK, in my own research, HSK 2.0 level 6 requires about 2,750 characters and the new HSK 3.0 level 9 requires about 3k.

[@playtypus4592]

One thing I noticed is that sometimes I will not recognize an individual character, even though I know plenty of words which contain it as part of a compound. It's weird. But I guess it's because the additional characters provide more context and thus make it easier to remember the word (which you may have learned in full anyway, rather than through learning the individual characters first).

[@gohitosun6859]

Yeah for native speaker this phenomenon is also common for some rare characters. E.g. If we read 缪 singly, we cannot recognize it, but if we read a chengyu 未雨绸缪, we will know it pronounced móu (seeing a single 缪 we cannot remember there is a word 未雨绸缪)

[@ABChinese]

Yep, happens to me all the time😂

[@quach8quach907]

@@gohitosun6859 I've never seen 绸 before, but I recognize the picto part. It has the glyph 糹(threads, silk) in it. That is the root of the meaning of the word "to twist, to combine."

[@gohitosun6859]

@@quach8quach907 Yeah. 纟 is the radical of 结. Also, silk is 丝绸 (sī chóu) in Chinese, where you can find 绸 as the second character.

[@hopscotch5872]

This just happened to me as I was taking that "how many CHinese characters do you know" quiz he mentioned. I saw 京 and was like... um this looks like 凉 or 停 but I don't know it. Felt so dumb when I realized it was 北京的京 haha

[@coolbrotherf127]

I've been studying Japanese for a bit so I know the character memorization struggles. After doing a lot of research and testing, I think what helped me the most was not over studying my kanji flash cards and instead going over them a few minutes twice a day and spending the rest of my study time watching a video with subtitles or reading along with an audiobook. Having new words in my head and seeing them pop up in real material was much better learning than just failing the same Anki cards over and over again. I think spending 20% on learning and reviewing vocab and 80% of the time engaging in some somewhat comprehensible material will work well for most people. After all, we don't learn languages to just learn words, use those words for real to understand something cool.

[@Azizn.7]

You helped me a lot, thanks dude

[@kaleoscreations8069]

I agree, I've so far been learning without flashcards at all, and have reached around HSK4 in 4.5 months. Input is key. All it takes is recognizing a word in a few different contexts, and it naturally sticks.

[@yokiliu2595]

I'm Chinese, but I find your video really interesting! You have enlightened me a lot in many aspects that I haven't known before!

[@stevenoviedo541]

One of my personal grievances is that some channels and some online teachers and even some native speakers perpetuate the "you will do more with fewer characters" in order not to descourage new learners. Is the same think that happens with the misperception of HSK 2.0 level 6. And when the fantasy breaks many people go through a tough time. Yes, I can say that from personal experience.

[@gohitosun6859]

There is an important law in a language: Zipf's Law. It says that the frequency of a word or hanzi is proportional to the rank r to α (which means it is r-th most frequent), i.e. f∝1/r^α, where α is a constant. So the more hanzi you learn, the less frequently new hanzi will appear in the text.

[@hannaosterlund5974]

Lol that’s actually quite awesome

[@arielp7582]

That's so redundant. "The more hanzi you become familiar with, the less likely it is that you'll encounter new hanzi in the future"

[@Lanayrulian]

Dang I got here fast, looking forward to this video as always! I'm at 631 characters (give or take a few that may have slipped my mind over time) but we're gettin there 📈

[@ABChinese]

That's not bad at all! You're almost at the pivot point;)

[@cocoanutte]

Awesome video - thank you

[@elizabethfreed472]

I always love your videos and I look forward to hearing more from you about this!

[@apisyom1189]

Smart clip! Enjoyable and informative.

[@deise6193]

I love to learn characters, I make handmade flashcards and put the pinyin with the "meaning" on the other side, it helps me to memorize the meaning of the character and also recognize it, I know learning how to write them is also important, but for now I will keep this method because is what work for me.

[@972aida]

valuable info for beginners like ourselves I didn't even know I needed. really helped to get a clearer picture of what I got my daughter into and adjust expectations 😅 many thanks

[@moth551]

I know ~800 words give or take right now, I’ve been working on HSK3 for a good month now after losing motivation in October of last year. You are very spot on about the recognizing patterns part. I find many pronunciations very predictable and I’m also getting better with memorizing characters since now I know what majority of Chinese radicals look like. It makes learning much quicker and more fun, I’m hoping to get to HSK4 sometime this year 👍

[@patrickvangelder3349]

good video! indeed I know around 750 characters now but often although I recognize 90% I still don't understand the sentence because combinations of known characters suddenly make up a new word eg. east+west suddenly means things

[@cmaven4762]

There is real value in being a linguistics student BEFORE you start learning written Mandarin ... because you are trained to look for / take note of the patterns in written symbols and the related patterns in the related spoken language. So I definitely don't know more than 150 characters, but I already have seen the patterns you mentioned at 750 and am using them to boost my understanding. I'm learning symbols more or less the way you would have as a kid, but because of the conscious pattern recognition I'm having a bit more success than other adults doing this without the linguistics background might have. Fascinating stuff.... Re: the end of HSK 2.0 ... It seems that after that point you could probably teach yourself any new characters / vocabulary, since it's highly likely there wouldn't be any new radicals... just new combinations. And from something else you said in a different video, it seems to me more likely that you'd be learning new words by combining characters rather than by adding entirely new characters ... All of this is still just stuff for me to look forward to, but it's very cool to think about.

[@user-xs4rz6vp6w]

Chinese characters are sometimes like the abjad system no so phonetically but make it quite clear to chinese speakers.😊

[@BlackwaterEl1te]

Half way HSK 3, so around 450 words still have a feeling i can only get like 2/10 or 1/3 of most sentences in dramas while listening. Well up to 750 and beyond the struggle continues.

[@asiaaro6534]

I’m a Chinese American guy who just recently entered a relationship with a guy from China, now I’m expanding on my Chinese for him. I’m only at HSK 4 so I still got a long way to go.

[@user-fs1sb4mn2b]

加油！

[@Stephen_Ito]

Ur parents must be disappointed 😞

[@sphjnx]

@@Stephen_Ito what

[@pohkokcheah2409]

be careful of 杀猪盘

[@zhongyingjun_cn]

"Only" at HSK 4? Hell I'm still struggling at HSK 2-3 ever since highschool 🤣

[@IsaacChoo88]

if you can read local news on newspaper with ease, your Chinese language proficiency is more than enough for daily use

[@dannysmooth8442]

This video was really encouraging! I started learning Mandarin around July 5th, 2023 and as of today, I've got just over 400 words in my flashcard app! I'm so close to that 750 mark! I already have an iTalki teacher lined up for when the time is right. Wow! SO EXCITED!

[@Tyrhonius]

I remember that feeling. 23 years later and I'm still learning new characters. It never ends. Enjoy the journey!

[@dannysmooth8442]

@@Tyrhonius 谢谢您。 I had a few days of melancholy, asking myself why and being frustrated with not being able to speak well yet. A new learning partner and I conducted an hour long session last night, it was amazing, and I'm right back up on cloud 9! 🤣 So thankful for the Internet! And thank you for your encouragement.

[@siemprestruggle9272]

@@dannysmooth8442 Hey, can i ask you for more detail on how you did this? Which flashcard app did you use? How did you decide which 400 (up to 750 words to learn), is this the HSK 1, 2, 3 vocab list?

[@dannysmooth8442]

@@siemprestruggle9272 the flashcard app I used is called ReWord. I made sure the words, characters, and phrases that seemed to be most important to me were in my learning line up. For example: I'm a machinist so I made sure to learn 机械师 at some point. I like asking people what they do for a living, so I made sure to learn 职业。etc etc. I also was sure to learn pinyin and how to type it on my phone so that when I hear a new word, I know the tones and can look it up to add to my flashcards, or when I see a new word (and if it has pinyin), I can pronounce it relatively close to correct.

[@ragnarbluechip8795]

I'm currently learning the dialogue of a chinese movie and feel I'm learning very uncommon characters. Most fun method so far tbh

[@rvaughanwilliams1988]

I often wonder if the structure of the characters could be built into the teaching method rather than being something you are left to figure out on your own. Maybe vocabulary lists could be structured around shared radicals or something like that?

[@GwenHrothgar]

that's how the "Remembering Traditional Hanzi" book is structured

[@muskyoxes]

I unearthed a text file of Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, and he only uses 3516 total characters, of which the top 2000 cover 99%. (I think high word counts treat variants separately, like if you know "cup" and "cups" you know two words)

[@davidlericain]

That's a good stat to know. Gives me hope I can one day read an actual novel. Maybe even Liu's work.

[@lotgc]

I think a lot of people hear that you need to know 2000 characters in order to read a newspaper in Chinese and then panic. The thing is though, 2000 characters isn't actually that much. 90% of daily speech is made up of the same 2000 words.

[@nicoleraheem1195]

If you're aiming for the 750 mark, Tuttle Publishing has a book for Chinese characters that has 800 characters for A1-A2 (CEFR) LEVEL. 🤓📚 Language Endeavor KZbin channel has videos specifically for writing per HSK level.

[@ayushmanV]

can u pls mention the name of that book N author asWell

[@Sinologist-uq7pv]

The pleco app has been very helpful to me.

[@Theo-oh3jk]

It's incredibly hard to pinpoint how much vocabulary a native knows in any language because 1) education differences 2) job-related terminology/jargon 3) subcultural slang 4) some languages have less vocabulary than others while other languages (looking at you, English) delight in synonymy. Just comparing dictionaries can be enlightening. The bigger Spanish or French dictionaries only have about 300k words while the bigger English ones have 500k+. Now, that doesn't mean a native speaker even knows 10% of those. There's also the difference between actively using words and passively recognizing words. My really hasty rule of thumb is highly educated is an active vocab of ~20k and conversational is an active vocab of around ~10k. With Chinese, this gets a little sticky considering the overlap of characters and word. Just to use your example of 2500 characters, if we assume a rate that each character on average can make 3 words with another, that gets us a vocab of ~7500 which is close to a conversational level. It's probably better than that, too. Now, with reading, stats of vocabulary or characters can be misleading. It isn't how many you know, it's how many you can comprehend/use. For example, for extensive reading, that is reading for understanding where, even if you don't know every word, you can understand the message, you need to understand 98% of the words. That means, for a very basic message, then 500 characters probably enough. But to understand 98% of a conversational level of 10k words, you need to know 98% of ~2500 characters, so about 2450. However, if you don't know what those words are and if you don't have even basic grammar, you will be unable to speak or understand messages.

[@reyhan963]

I want to save almost all off your videos in my favorite saves! And i want to say it Just to let you know that how much I love the information you give and how can these make a new Chinese leaderner happy!(and some times scared'-')

[@ABChinese]

Ahhh thank you for your kind words!

[@cindy4617]

Hi thank you so much for this video! I started learning English at age 5 and my chinese had stayed the same ever since. Seeing this has been a huge motivation for me to start catching up with chinese! Quick question, where should I learn my chinese at?

[@TennisGvy]

I like graded readers personally. Easy vocab, but the plots aren't terrible

[@edwardfowble9429]

我也是。I use the du chinese app and the readers from mandarin companion. I worry that someone might think they have to grind on characters for a long time before they can start reading.

[@TennisGvy]

@@edwardfowble9429 Nice! They aren't as interesting as the Mandarin Companion series, but the Chinese Breeze series goes up in level to 750, 1000, and 1500 characters if I'm remembering right.

[@Theo-oh3jk]

@@edwardfowble9429 I had two years (at two different institutions) of classes in Mandarin, spaced a apart by years. I am now coming back to it, and I am using Du Chinese and Mandarin Companion as well. I'm only on the breakthrough level, and I find what is confusing me more now is grammar instead of characters.

[@doteigo]

There is a huge difference in "how many words native speakers know" because nobody can agree on how to count a "word." For example, if you know the word "fire"... is that 1 word? or 4 words? (1. the hot red thing, 2. to dismiss someone from their job, 3. passion, 4. amazing). And if we already counted "up," should we count "fire up" as a separate word? So depending on how you count, a native speaker could know about 10,000 words, or well over 60,000. (Of course, other big factors are job and hobbies... a medical doctor with a love of poetry probably knows way more words than a typical person)

[@craftyyounglady]

Both those language tests made me feel pretty good about my literacy . lol. English 35000 words. And apparently 400 Chinese characters! Although i would say i probably know less than half that with any confidence.

[@williamjohn6939]

I would really like to know your opinion on Mandarin Blueprint program. You may have never heard of it but a quick search will give you the gist. I purchased it and kinda put it on the back burner. You are making me want to start again. It is intended to teach you a method to learn characters. I don’t recall it focusing on words, yet. I’m only at 150 characters so quite the novice. Your videos are honest and revealing. I appreciate that.

[@Poopa-lb7mb]

Wow!!! Learning 750 Chinese characters to be able to read a little more than kids books, what a dream!! It will take time....long time. I have a question. Would the use of Pinyin to begin, hurt my learning of reading/writing Chinese? Your videos are great. Thank you for helping us out to learn.

[@stephenreiss7181]

你很聪明！I only know 4 characters/3 words 😂 Honestly, what a GREAT video!!! I'm trying to learn Chinese and love your videos! Keep making them!

[@ayejay8862]

Novels would be harder, because news language is more textbook, where as novels lean more toward creative writing, which, as the genre implies, is more about creativity than conforming to strict and finite linguistic rules. I think in Japanese, they usually say 2500 is the magic number for kanji (hanzi), and they don't even use as many hanzi as Chinese, naturally. I tend to equate hanzi more with English words than an alphabet. So, how many words do you need to know to read English, without resorting to a dictionary? I don't know the answer, but I think that's a more or less comparable question.

[@laithtwair]

It's crazy how many more characters Chinese people know that Japanese. Like by the end of elementary school the average Chinese kid knows as many characters as a Japanese teenager finishing high school

[@deacudaniel1635]

Now I know only around 2000 characters and I'm studying in a Chinese university together with native Chinese students, so I have to read native Chinese university level textbooks and novels with my only 2000 character level.I could understand 90% of textbooks contents but can't understand anything from novels, so you are right, literature is the hardest thing ever you could read in Chinese as a foreigner, and we are also required to learn Classical Chinese, which to me looks like a totally different language from modern Chinese, let's say, like the difference between English and Latin.Regarding the learning process of characters, I started to see some repetitive patterns from my first 150 characters, but I didn't realise there is actually a logic behind them, so I continued to memorise them in the boring and inefficient "write every character 100 times" method.I think I already knew how to read 700-800 characters when I first learned about 六书 and the radicals. Regarding conversation, I started texting my Chinese friends in Chinese since I passed HSK 3 (600 characters).

[@liyuqi8092]

I’m currently reading 十宗罪 but I still need to use a dictionary. There’s a lot of words outside the HSK but it feels like a real accomplishment. Just being able to understand and slowly improve is nice.

[@Tyrhonius]

9:00 The 大 in 大夫 can also be pronounced da4. It's only pronounced dai4 when 大夫 means doctor.

[@k.p.8955]

Yes please make videos on the logic of Chinese characters.

[@CharlesBender-or9mv]

I truly believe I am the worst Chinese student who keeps trying. After three years of study I currently know about 300 characters and plan to keep going. 谢谢老师我觉得你很好!!!!

[@ABChinese]

谢谢同学！That’s even more commendable though

[@RingsOfSolace]

bro one of the people in the italki ad is my actual chinese tutor lmao

[@Mnogojazyk]

To answer your question about the number of words learned for effective communication, why don’t you contact the linguistics department of a college or university?

[@owl6218]

hearing you speak english and korean and knowing you know chinese is nice. in india we all need to know 2 or 3 languagues, just to survive...long live polyglotism (is polygloty a word?)

[@quach8quach907]

I never heard of 大夫 in Vietnamese as "doctor". 博士 bác sĩ "a lot + scholar" is "doctor" in Vietnamese.

[@jitkakovarova5215]

Thank you for this video. I have been learning Chinese for ca. 1,5 years, self-study, ca. 30 minutes a day maximum. No idea how many characters I know. My level is around HSK 3. I feel quite satisfied yet there is still a long way ahead of me. Could you tell me please, from your POV, how good (bad) it is? I know that everyone has different progress and abilities, yet I have nowhere else to ask. Thank you very much a please keep on posting.

[@kaleoscreations8069]

Sounds proportional to 30 mins a day

[@ElliLovett]

I took this english word test out of curiosity and i feel like all the fancy words that id did know, i knew from playing dnd. Maybe you just have to play more dnd :P I got 24000 but i feel like this can not be true because i search for words while speaking on a regularly so it is probably just shifted upwards because of the fancy words from dnd. On the other hand i also search for words while speaking my native language so maybe i am just slow.

[@rusope1050]

i'm at 150 already yay :')

[@Calagat]

Proportionally you need a vocabulary of 10k words for 3000 hanzi.Or even more to make any sense if a long news paper article.

[@stevenalexander3032]

What frequency list should I use for the 750 word mark?

[@vvjavviervv]

Hi! I love the language (Chinese) but I also love the characters, for me as an artist those characters are art… my question how do you say and write the word “ART”? Thank you.

[@hotpot6352]

艺术

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

I've just started learning Mandarin, but I have learned Japanese. In fact you CAN estimate how much words or characters you need, by for instance, using softwares and websites where you can put as input books or news websites and estimating the most common words. In Japanese, that uses less characters under 2 thousand characters you can't read s1* that is meaningful. Ad words you will start to get by only after 10 thousand words. But to read comfortably any MENAINGFUL thing (lt's say, the economy section of a newspaper, the Crime and Punishment or Guns Germs and Steel in Japanese you need around 3o thousand words and you'll still have to look a lot of things up. What people often get wrong is that coverage of CHACTERS or WORDS in a given text does NOT equals coverage of MEANING. To that (and yo also have articles and sites in English to show you that)) you need 98% coverage of WORDS. 70% coverage of WORDS will still make you miss whole sentences and paragraphs! ad the reason why is that the most infrequent words are also generally carries most of the MENAING of the sentence. Ina sentence of about 12 words you still an miss TWO and the ENTIRE sentence will get over your head. BUT, at this point you'll just have to look it up. 70% of coverage of WORS (or kanjis/hanzis) mean a lot LESS coverage of MEANING. don't fool yourself guys. I did. To have an ADULT EDUCATED conversation no less than somewhere 20-30 thousand words. To read RELA SH1*, like the books above mentioned as well.

[@iffus_akiyoshi]

This makes language learning sound so intimidating. English is my second language. I learned it in school over a period of many years so I don't really understand how difficult learning a new language actually is. I want to learn Japanese and Mandarin on my own... but I wonder how long it would take before I could fully understand difficult books in those languages if I only study 1 hour per day.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@iffus_akiyoshi For a different language like Japanese or Mandarin really just one hour per day (including immersion and even passive listening?) to read difficult books? At least ten years Id say. Language is mainly about mileage. Hoe many words and structures you encounter (understanding it) and how many times you bump into each one. If you really don't have the time I'd suggest you increase at least your time on passive listening (if you can't do active). Matt from Matt VS Japan has really good videos about it. While you do other things, listen to the language in the background, on a headphone, for instance. ANKI is also GREAT for that same reason. 3 hours a day, for instance, of ANKI may seen dauting. But it takes just a few seconds to do each card. Now I have my sick parents to take care of and for that and other reasons life is chaotic and I can't do nearly as much as I did doing Japanese. so I can't do CONSISTENTLY 2, 3 yours a day of ANKI. But some days I do. Every time you have ten seconds take your phone and do some cards. In a waiting line for instance. You'll get up in the morning, have lunch, the sun will set you'll have dinner and before bed you'll still have ten cards to do. But you WILL do 400-500 sentence cards with long sentences (my preferred) or over a THOUSAND in a single day with word cards doing like this, even in a very busy day. Now, focused time, like active listening, reading a book attentively,, you get more from it for each minute spent. and you get less from passive listening and quickly reviewing cards while between errands. But you DO get something. It's better than nothing. And it will get you a long way by the compound effects of weeks, months and years. F9r example, listening to the target language while showring may not look like doing much. But if you ake a shower of, let's say, five minutes, five minutes each day over a YEAR makes a lot of difference. That's a long run. What seem to make no difference in the short term make ALL the difference in the LONG run.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@iffus_akiyoshi Remember that, you may have just one hour to sit down and focus only on studying the language. But with ANKI and passive listening you can get 4 minutes of shower doing passive listening here, 20 seconds continuing to review the cards on ANKI due for that day there, and another 3 minutes to listen to some more while walking. You can get more 2 hours out of it, totalizing 3 hours a day. That's way faster. 3, 4 years to get to read difficult books if you save the days when you have more time and energy to do some more focused activities instead of those ones. always juggling. When I can't focus I can AT LEAST listen to something on the background and do 10 seconds of ANKI. When I can have more half an hour, 1 and a half a day, to sit and focus I do it then. Integrate it in your daily life the best as you can, as new circumstances present themselves, varying between those unfocused and sparse activities to focused and longer continuos times and will always get what you need for that day, being flexible and considering your life, not other's.

[@iffus_akiyoshi]

@@JohnnyLynnLee thank you for the comprehensive advice.

[@yutuberboy]

PLEASE give me an idea of characters and words needed to watch Chinese TV series. Im told start with hong kong (mandarin dubbed ) or taiwan modern series. they use simpler words than China serier. Thank you

[@TheAlana.]

I’m only at 300, it’s not bad for only a year into studying

[@hfdennycheng9010]

AS A CHINESE, I JUST KNOW ABOUT 500 COMMON CHINESE CHARACTERS

[@c.ry.o]

How can i study my character knowledge? Most leaning apps are mostly vocab

[@AS-wi6hr]

moral of the story, breaking down 'words' to their sound components was a brilliant solution. Did all languages start as 'picto/ideo-grams'? (I wonder) (I'll ask chatgpt :P )

[@Simon-tc1mc]

I appreciate your disclaimer at the end since to me it doesn't make sense to count characters learned since a character's meaning can vary based on its use, and acting like memorizing characters translates into knowing the language just isn't the case. I don't track characters, but I'm not even sure how many words I know since I also include sentence examples in my flashcard deck. I think tracking your performance is better than an arbitrary number. Like right now I can understand phrases from spoken and written Chinese, but I struggle with sentences, and have no comprehension of paragraphs or overall meanings. My speaking skills are limited as I can only form single sentences with multiple pauses. Those are still measurable benchmarks where I'm now working on understanding sentences and not just phrases, and I want to speak a sentence without any pauses. You can memorize a thousand characters and still have no ability to understand or speak them.

[@Henry-teach-Chinese-in-jokes]

I’ve spent about 100,000 hours studying English humor and Western culture. My native language is Chinese. I can create many innovative jokes in the spirit of Chinese jokes and English humor. I teach Chinese language in jokes. Laughter can reduce tensions.

[@quach8quach907]

The Japanese figured this out, long ago. Only about 2,000 Kanji characters are needed for 95% of Chinese.

[@lexxryazanov]

But how do you know how many characters you already remember? I'm not keeping score.

[@AhmedEraj-fo7ou]

Does anyone know of any bilingual (EN/CH) textbook or textbook series that I can use to learn 10,000 high-frequency words with example sentences for each word?

[@owl6218]

I spend a lot of time using google translate and a character dictionary trying to demystify chinese characters. The character dictionary allows me to dissect the character into components all the way down to the simplest radicals. Endless rabbit hole. Was looking at all characters that contain 古, for example. 胡 is a character that means wild, reckless (adverb, may be). Now, how does old, moon come to mean wild🙃🙃? i get it. they need some unique representation for the word (idea) reckless, which they have generate using these pre-existing characters. In other languages, the sound of the word ('reckless') stores the meaning. In chinese a unique symbol stores that meaning. .....Anyway, it is fun to sometimes use the radicals present to guess what the character may stand for. But some times the combination of radicals present appears random, and funny. This 枯 (ku), meaning 'withered', 'dried', on the other hand is very satisfying - old tree is 'withered'. I laughed when I realized 姑 is 'paternal aunt' or 'husband's mother'. 'aunt' is 'old woman'? haha. Also the cultural insight is price less. Did they have the practice of marrying women to their paternal aunt's son? Because, in south india, they do have this practice, and the relationship term for 'husband's mother' is indeed 'paternal aunt'......

[@ignitemoment]

The radical 月 is actually a special form of 肉, which means "meat, flesh", not "moon". Like in 肌(muscle)

[@Primemantis108]

Use case. Western is low context communication. Eastern high context communication.

[@EchoLog]

Feels like the 750-character mark you found is the same as figuring out how the historical spelling systems of English or Tibetan work. Learning to read each in the beginning is all brute force and acceptance that the patterns will show up later. Basically dark souls taught me the best language learning strategy: git gud

[@Cedric_Skywaka]

8:34 Thats what she said

[@ahjit7283]

Can group all Chinese character into 100. Eg group 人☞write all character pattern with 人。二☞write all character pattern with 二。Eg 工，土干士云亏会 。。

[@cmaven4762]

Based on those tests, my English vocabulary is around 42605 words ... lol ... but my Mandarin ... 80 characters .... I may know as many as 100 words ... lol ... as a point of reference, I started learning characters back in October last year. I think I'm doing fairly well, considering my only study material atm is the Mandarin subs on Cdramas .... lol ...

[@ABChinese]

😳42,000...

[@cmaven4762]

@@ABChinese lol Work related.... 😂😇

[@owl6218]

oh, yes. I only learnt around characters, but watching C dramas with same language subtitles on youtube allows me to reinforce the characters I know. I can never forget the 'wa', 'ni' , 'pu' , 'mei' characters now :-)

[@nitsum8874]

is it possible to learn to only read Chinese, but not to speak it? I mean knowing the meaning of characters and compound words but not knowing how to pronounce them or not knowing the language itself?

[@defaultset]

I think learning 汉字at around 2500+ would be good enough. Because, as an english speaker, do you _really_ know every, single, word, in the dictionary? Like, even in english, I don’t even know what some words mean despite being at a native level. That’s what people get wrong about Chinese, you _don’t_ have to learn every single character. You just have to learn common words or characters, and just google or use context clues for the rest. In my humble experience, does the common lad encounter an individual with such a high perspicacity of linguistics to justify unnecessarily pressuring themselves in such profound erudition and seek pedagogical assistance from a connoisseur of a chosen language? Or do you just wanna talk like this to friends, family, and other people and learn about their culture? Nobody is ever perfect in a language, because even the natives struggle in their own. Amazing video! Great insight as well.

[@ayatiiii4153]

I have question there's book it's name tuttle chinese character ok this book have( 800) chinese character +I have hsk books from level 1_6 +I have dictionary chinese this dictionary have pictures for example in the hospital there's pictures and under all the pictures chinese word and what it's mean I speak a lot sorry because I'm beginner in this language I start before one weak so I'm afraid . Is these books enough to speak chinese and be like translater 😢 And how can I save the character in my brain there's easy way because sometimes I forget them 😢

[@dasasimoveisrealestateinbr1641]

wow, I love your work, I've been wanting to hear native speakers speak, but I have a question and a request: The question is which of you two aren't Chinese? I'm starting to learn Chinese, but I've heard that it would be easier if I studied Korean first because the writing system is easier, studying Japanese because of the pronunciation and when I start again with Chinese it will be much easier to use structures of both languages and that the grammar of Chinese is similar to that of English, but when translating from English it is easier to translate into Korean and from Korean into Japanese and from Japanese into Chinese for me to have a more accurate translation, that is true ? But since I want to live in China in Hong Kong or Singapore or Beijing, I have to learn traditional Cantonese and Mandarin, which is more difficult, because listening to information that Chinese is very difficult because of the writing, I'm just listening to the tones, but looking forward to getting to the characters or holograms because I love drawing and I am easy to memorize, sometimes I memorize almost 900 words in a period of 8 hours, I have been having this free time to study languages for 49 days, but I will reduce it to 4 hours when I get back to work and it will be in a few days, and I will focus on what is important using the Pareto Principle and after I get the 80% I will go deeper to have the maximum level in each language..I am a native of Brazil, I live in Israel for almost 4 years, so, Hebrew is my second language and I'm studying English, Russian and Chinese, but thinking about taking the most interesting Asian package in the world, although I already lived with the Japanese community in Brazil for a couple of years, when I played park-golf with them, but we only got together on weekends to play but I'm more familiar. About the request, please put automatic subtitles in your videos so I can follow you, because I study English only by reading subtitles and listening while I read. For me, after learning the pronunciation, reading and listening and then writing the transcript is the fastest way to learn a language...

[@ABChinese]

Heeeey! Who are you referring to in the question? And sure, I’ll start making sure auto subtitles are on!

[@dasasimoveisrealestateinbr1641]

@@ABChinese Heeeey! Who are you referring to in the question? And sure, I’ll start making sure auto subtitles are on!

[@dasasimoveisrealestateinbr1641]

@@ABChinese I remembered, there is a mistake but I was watching a video of yours that it would be possible to use 500 characters to read Mandarin and in it there is a girl who starts reading, that was it, it was not that video of yours, I lost myself, making a compilation of great videos and your channel is one of them, but okay, I want to know if you are japanese, korean or chinese? And she is the girl in the 500 characters video, is she Japanese or Korean?

[@ABChinese]

@@dasasimoveisrealestateinbr1641 Oh haha yeah, that is my video, and I didn't have auto-subtitles in that one because half of that video was in Chinese and half in English, so auto-subtitles wouldn't work. I'm Chinese and the girl is also Chinese. She's Grace from the KZbin channel GraceMandarinChinese btw!

[@user-xs4rz6vp6w]

Chinese characters sometimes are like the abjad system. I read the phonetic sign in a character and I know what is it going to be in the language and so on except some individual characters 😶‍🌫️

[@user-jo3hl6vt9q]

I took the English test and I have only 14000+ The thing is I’ve been speaking English since I was 3 and that’s all the words I know

[@koitsukiaya8454]

I did try that preply and like you said, maybe I'm just illiterate 😂😂 but not really, it's not your fault since it's not your 1st language and what field you want to focus on. Not sure. 5000 words are not enough, especially when someone is studying in China with chinese language as a main language in class. There will be a lot of new vocabularies in academic field, you need to write essay and thesis which 5000 words are not enough... Imo 🙏🏼😁

[@ABChinese]

I agree, fluency should be around 10,000 words. So what did you get on Preply?

[@Melty01]

hello I just wondering do you do tranditional characters 繁體字?

[@ABChinese]

Yes! I can read traditional also, just not as well as simplified

[@ayejay8862]

By the way, where did you take the short test to see how many characters you know? I'm interested in trying that.

[@ABChinese]

Here you go! English: preply.com/en/learn/english/test-your-vocab 中文: hanzitest.ericjiang.com

[@ayejay8862]

@@ABChinese Why thank you!

[@Diamond-rl2on]

I know 12,324 words in English 👀

[@Xsomono]

Is it useful to know the meaning of characters on their own? Ive been learning Chinese for a while now and I had the impression that knowing a single isolated character is not very helpful because a large majority of words are made up of two characters. Is the meaning of a two-character word so apparent from the single characters its made up of? So far I just assumed that a word made of two characters probably has a very different meaning and that I wouldn't be able to figure it out just from context and knowing the individual characters. Does anyone have experience with this?

[@josuensiama1777]

Me too

[@user-im3rp9ux2l]

I would like to say though… as an art form, the characters excel. But for practical day to day use… it’s impractical.

[@ElvisNoris-zp1jm]

The Chinese writing system seems very inferior to the writing system used in the West. I don't think I will ever attempt to learn that language (Chinese). I am not a hater, I just said what I think.

[@turkmusik]

As you say, people wrongly equate characters with words. This is an error. If you take just 12 characters, you can get many, many words (two-character meanings). And you will not necessarily understand those words. So you're right. Some people say that 2,500 words in English will tell you most of the English language. They're wrong. It's not true. They ignore the many meanings of common words, e.g., "make," which goes into make-up, make out, make away with, make do, make up (invent), make you do something, make your way through, etc. That said, once you have 3,000 words, you can infer a lot of partial meanings.

[@owl6218]

I did not need to get to the end of the video to recognize the 'words' problem. The wa characters are put together to form words is as intricate, or more, than how the characters are made from radicals. As someone who just picked up some 20 characters, and who tries to understand the structure of the chinese language, i can already see the problem. when characters are paired together, the word which forms is loaded with 2 or 3 different meanings.....there is an astronomical amount of ambiguity everywhere. I am not even including the technical words used for science and technology . So, the project for an adult non-chinese appears impossible. Yet, by taking a close look at the language, I got to understand how it operates, and how it sounds (by watching dramas relentlessly). It is a fine language system. I do hope to learn all the characters that appear in the Dao Te Ching, tho....I can get a grasp of some chinese language usage mechanisms by comparing to similar things in the indian languages...I think the most difficult part of chinese language is the strictly one character one syllable rule. So many characters have the same sound. All words sound the same.....It is as if the verbal part of the language was sacrificed for the written spect, long back........on the whole interesting

[@mawcel]

Turned into a salesman like in a south park episode 😂

[@azadsprogramm]

great video! i am the 10,000th view :D

[@richardhartung1576]

Harry Potter has around 4000 unique characters and 25.000 unique words~ :)

[@ABChinese]

That's insane... do you have a source for that?

[@IsotonicSundae]

its trust me bro

[@michaelliver8510]

@@ABChinese lol maybe the entire seven book series? I read the first book recently quite comfortably, and only know around 2600 characters

[@michaelliver8510]

I actually have written a program to analyze these things and went and checked it. The first book has 2781 unique characters and 7771 unique words

[@michaelliver8510]

For all 7 books combined I got 3865 characters and 21530 words, so that must be where the number comes from (with some rounding up to seem more impressive)

[@catman4859]

As someone who is trying to learn chinese to read webnovels and chinese novels: F*ck!

[@ABChinese]

🥲RIP

[@oldsachem]

Dear Who, I found your YT videos this morning. I have watching all day. I still don't know your name. Let me ask: In your opinion, how important for world peace is it that Americans learn to think, read, and understand the Chinese language?

[@TalaySeedam]

In Taiwan you need to know 4800 characters to be treated as a literate person.

[@swaystar1235]

1500 to read at a 1st grade level bruh lol

[@ActionDaily]

So glad I didnt have to learn this growing up lol

[@arminebner2846]

5000

[@strategicfooyouagencyfirst8197]

我觉得小学水平就够了，也就是800字基本就没问题了。

[@dingdingnian288]

Chinese is the hardest. It requires dedication discipline and hard work to become a decent speaker. Many foreigners think they are good, when there grammar, word choice and especially the pronounciation actually sucks…. Bitter truth😂

[@nicoleraheem1195]

If native speakers know 80 percent of the words in a dictionary, then that should pin point it

[@morejoy5188]

But, wot If u is learning Traditional Chinese?

[@user-dk4ko8yj9u]

繁体中文只有台湾香港在用，香港新生代也用简体，台湾很快会回归到时候也会接受简体教育。学习繁体中文比简体要慢很多，而且太复杂你放弃学习中文的可能性会增加。印度尼西亚也使用简体中文

[@AwakenZen]

​@@user-dk4ko8yj9uI agree but not with the Taiwan part

[@lnaru]

I know about 10 characters 😂

[@chai3623]

Om, I think I’m around that rn 😢 I didn’t get my Notebook yet so I couldn’t organise it, Im using flash cards currently but I think I know around 30 characters and 60 words, I can write but not accurately speak since I haven’t Made tones a priority yet and Im tone deaf so it’s very much harder