The first question most students ask would be undoubtedly “how many characters are there’? Altogether? More than 40,000 – though many are very rare. To be honest, only 2,000 characters are needed for literacy and even read the newspaper. A really well-educated person in China who studied ancient Chinese literature would know about 4,000-5,000. Unless you want to become a literaturist, you simply don’t need that many!
But the key skill we want you to have is “Recognizing characters”, instead of memorizing writing each characters by heart. There are a few reasons.
First reason, we are living in a very electronic world, phones or computers are taking over as our daily form of communication rather than hand written notes or letters. By using the phone or computers, once you know the Pinyin pronunciation of the words, you can type that and find a list of characters to choose from, at that point, you will need your character recognizing skills to choose the right ones. Most of the time, you can type in the two syllables word together, and the device will showcase a few options where the most common ones are listed in the front.
Second reason, in HSK test, the first 2 levels are presented in both Pinyin and characters, from HSK 3 onward, the test paper is only presented in characters, but even in HSK 3 Intermediate level, you are only requested to write a dozen of simple characters by heart in the writing part.
Third reason, we know for a fact a lot of advanced non-native Mandarin learners such as Niel from Confused Laowai, are not learning character writing at all. If you focus is on communication, it goes without doubt that spending more time in listening, speaking and reading practice should out weight character writing practice.
As we say early that you only need about 2000 characters to be literate in China, for up to Intermediate level, you just need about 500 characters for your daily communication, say writing text messages or emails, read street signs and restaurant menus, check the bills and fill in some forms.
Some students find it frustrating mostly in the first 250 character mark, some even asked “do Chinese people all have a super brain to remember that many characters by heart”. The truth is of course knowing characters is due to any genetic advantages, the simple fact is Chinese children grow up with learning new characters every single day up to age 15, that’s more than 10 years of study without other daily obligations.
Any adult students who are studying Chinese while in university or working full time, are mostly left with a small amount of expendable time per day, so the frustration of slow progress is hugely due to study time allocation. Especially the first 250 words, just like the first 1 kilometre in running, it’s always the most difficult mark to pass. After that, you will start to learn faster, and get used to look at these beautiful symbols.
