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

✅ Learn 150+ languages with quality native-speaking teachers on italki.🎉 Buy $10 get $5 off your first lesson using my code: ABC5

✍️ 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!

⚠️ 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.

✧✧STUFF I LOVE✧✧ (affiliate)
10% off with code: ABCHINESE
20% off with code: ABCHINESE

✧FOLLOW ME!✧

**Fan mail ✈ DM me on Instagram or Tiktok

🎹 MUSIC:

Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!)
--------------------------------------------------------------
Feeling Home:
License code: UECYG7YURZMCOIGC

Alone:
Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
License code: AYQRVZT8IVGA0N9X

Dream bird:
License code: 6SDKJJY9AWKKPAU2

Sunny:
License code: JPPPNZBUBZPBP3KB

600 Horses:
License code: MIQXEUV6C9T9MJFS

Superchill:
License code: NEKVPFNL0ZTUOCPB

Hometown:
License code: RXGKFDXKCEF0FKWW

Chase the Sun:
License code: LPES9ZX5FFGAWNJC

@Italkilanguage ​

[ABChinese]

✅ Learn 150+ languages with quality native-speaking teachers on italki.🎉 Buy $10 get $5 off your first lesson using my code: ABC5

Wanna test your English or Chinese? 😂 These are the tests I used:

[MusicLingoZhenrui]

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

[lucasroceli]

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.

[umihikari]

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... 😅

[coolbrotherf]

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.

[playtypus]

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).

[yokiliu]

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!

[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.

[moth]

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 👍

[overlordartorius]

I learned around 7, 000 words in Chinese, including about 1, 200 traditional characters and about 800 simplified characters, because the book I was using is excellent for compound words. The book is Chinese Reader (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) by De Francis.

[dannysmooth]

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!

[asiaaro]

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.

[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 📈

[stevenoviedo]

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.

[deise]

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.

[gohitosun]

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.

[patrickvangelder]

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

[cmaven]

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.

[aida]

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