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1000 CNY Challenge: How many characters needed to read Chinese?
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sthubbar -

I bet 1000 CNY (~$132) that the number of characters needed to read Chinese is 4000+.

Why am I betting this? I am betting because I think it is a big disservice to beginning learners
to tell them that 2000, 2500, or 3000 characters is enough to read Chinese. At the rate of 500
characters/year they might think it will only take 4 or 5 years, when at that rate it would take 8
years.

For such a simple question there has been so much debate, so let me make some clarifications.

READING versus VOCABULARY

There is a difference between reading being the limiting factor and vocabulary being the limiting
factor. I can read French. If given a French paper to read, I can read it and understand 30%, if a
French speaker were to read the same paper to me my understanding would still be about 30%. The
limiting factor is vocabulary, not the ability to read. With Chinese, if given something to read,
I might understand 15%, if the same item is read out loud by a Chinese person my understanding may
be 60%. The limiting factor is the ability to read, not vocabulary.

INFORMAL CHALLENGE

Here is my informal challenge to give you an idea of what I mean. I can and do live an existence
where I speak Chinese 95% of the time. I never get tired of speaking Chinese and just wish I could
speak my mother tongue to relax. Being able to read for me would mean that I can read Chinese all
day and then when tired I can also read it to relax. A second condition would be the above
mentioned where my listening and reading abilities are about equal and they should be greater than
my spoken ability.

WHAT THIS DOES NOT MEAN

This does not mean being fluent. I know many non-native English speakers that are far from fluent
and they can read English and can meet the below formal challenge. I can meet the formal challenge
using my spoken ability, but not my reading ability.

This does not mean reading poetry. I don't read that type of stuff in my mother tongue. This means
just day to day reading.

FORMAL CHALLENGE

At what point can one sustain a long-term (6 months+) professional existence where 95% of the
written material one encounters, including leisure time, is written in Hanzi.

EXAMPLES OF PEOPLE EXCLUDED FROM THIS CHALLENGE

The unemployed, or unskilled laborers. What do I mean? I have a friend that came to China and
spent 10-12 hours, per day, buried in Hanzi with a book in one hand and a dictionary in the other.
He could say that he was 95% exposed to Hanzi, but he was in the process of learning. He could not
sustain a professional existence with that lifestyle. The unskilled could live in the middle of
China and only need to recognize where to put there name and say they are exposed 95% to Hanzi.
They are just avoiding their illiteracy. If you can convince me that you could sustain a
professional job using 95% Hanzi and you are just temporarily unemployed then you can collect the
1000 CNY.

People with a background in Hanzi or Chinese. This would exclude native born Chinese, Korean and
Japanese citizens. This would also disqualify anyone who grew up in an environment where they
spoke any dialect of Chinese.

PEOPLE THAT MIGHT SAY THEY CAN READ HANZI, YET REALLY CAN'T

Professional exposure, leisure avoidance I am thinking of two specific individuals in this
category. One is a professional translator that can claim to be exposed to Hanzi for 95% of their
job. The other is a computer programmer where all of the coworkers only speak Chinese. The trick
with the computer programmer is that every major programming language, including HTML is written
in English. These two people in particular when leaving work do not spend 95% of their leisure
time exposed to Hanzi, they read English or their mother tongue if different. I would include
either of the above people if they can say that after work they are almost exclusively exposed to
Hanzi, and that is how they obtain most of their written input, such as movie reviews, gossip,
news, whatever.


Introduce me to an individual that knows less than 4000 Hanzi and can meet the above formal
challenge and I will pay up. I will pay in person or via paypal in US$ using www.xe.com exchange
rate.



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gato -

I don't see why you are so fixed on 4000 instead of 3000. Where did you get the 4000 number?

See this thread:
http://www. /showthread.php?t=15960

Based on my experience and studies I've read, 3000 characters does cover most everyday reading
needs -- covering some 99% of the newspaper- level texts. But to improve you reading, you need to
learn words over and above characters. About 10,000 words would allow you to read fairly
comfortably.










ChineseSpeaker -

Chinese Characters At a Glance
If you think there are too many Chinese characters, it is not true at all! But I don't like to
talk about it, just like we don't need to know how much oxygen exists on our planet, we breathe
just as much as that is necessary to health.
How many Chinese characters do you need to know? It is far less than you may imagine. Is 1000 too
few? Is 2000 enough? Or better, 3000? In any case, it depends on why you learn Chinese.
With one thousand Chinese characters one can read a short novel and write a simple letter, just
like Chinese students in the second grade can do. If one knows 3000, admiration! It corresponds to
the level of Chinese that students in middle school achieve. These people can read and write
newspapers, novels, and essays. That is, they are free to do almost everything in Chinese.
The brutal misconstrue is that many believe that there are too many Chinese characters. Comparing
with English we are sure that the total number of Chinese characters is less than the total number
of English words, and the number of commonly used Chinese characters is less than the number of
commonly used English words.
Here are the coverage rates of the most frequently used Chinese characters:


The most frequently used Chinese characters coverage rates %(statistics of publications)
10 12
100 40
500 80
1000 95
2500 >99


Thus China National Language Committee just announced 2500 Chinese characters as common used. Now
you know how many Chinese characters you should learn as a simple outsider.










sthubbar -

There is a saying "There are three types of lies 'Lies, damned lies, and statistics." I am very
familiar with all of the quoted statistics about character frequency.

What I'm looking for is a real-live living breathing human being. I pick 4000 because the people I
know that can beat this challenge all know more than 4000 characters. I personnaly know 2000+
characters and I am no where near being able to read 99.95% of Hanzi text as the "statistics"
state. BTW, the characters I know are mostly in the top 2000 most frequent characters, it is not
as if I started at the bottom of the list and learned the most obscure characters first.

From this poll, I encourage one of the less than 4000+ characters respondents to come forward.










gougou -

I chose the third option - based on number of characters, though, the description is not accurate.
I should be around 3000 characters now (maybe below, will let you know when I get home). At work,
as I am doing plenty of market research, most of the material I see is in Chinese. Generally
speaking, the only characters I need to look up are those for metals and other very specific
things. In my freetime - well, haven't really had any since I started working...

I don't quite get your challenge though. Some people will be able to work excellently in a job
where they only understand 50% of what they're reading. What do you mean by sustain?










sthubbar -

Gougou, I mean, can you live your life only reading characters? If you are on the toilet with
nothing to read would you read the Hanzi on the back of the shampoo bottle for a distraction?










imron -

The thing is, once you get beyond 2000 characters, it's not the number of characters you know, but
rather the number of words you know that becomes important. I also chose option 3 in your poll,
and if/when I look something up in the dictionary, it's usually not because I didn't recognise a
character, but rather because I didn't know the meaning of a word that was made up of characters I
already knew. Increasing the number of characters I know by another 1000 wouldn't have nearly as
much benefit for my reading as increasing the number words I know by 1000.










sthubbar -

Imron, I agree with what you are saying. My belief is that in the process of increasing your
vocabulary so that you can pass the challenge, you will, by default, also gradually be learning
characters. So it is not as if just learning 4000 characters would allow someone to pass the
challenge, but I contend that anyone that has put in the effort to reach 4000 characters has also
put in the effort to increase their vocabulary. It is sort of a chicken and the egg problem, but I
still contend that the only people that can past the test not only know lots of words, they also
know 4000+ characters.










muyongshi -



Quote:

Gougou, I mean, can you live your life only reading characters? If you are on the toilet with
nothing to read would you read the Hanzi on the back of the shampoo bottle for a distraction?

I do and it has nothing to do with this. I know those characters and find it interesting but I do
that in English too. But I first did when I was starting learning because it was a challenge and
it was interesting. For me it's habit and nothing to do with living my life only reading
characters.

I agree with imron...the words are more important than the characters (of course the are necessary
to know the words but i think the focus is off).










gougou -



Quote:

Gougou, I mean, can you live your life only reading characters?

That makes it even more vague. I lived in Moscow for a year, the first few months of which I
didn't know any Russian at all - still I was able to live my life, and quite happily so.



Quote:

If you are on the toilet with nothing to read would you read the Hanzi on the back of the shampoo
bottle for a distraction?

You could have enquired about something less personal than my hygiene habits , but, yes, I do that.

I'm not alone, though.












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