How many Chinese characters do you know?

DOn’t get too excited about measuring “proficiency” through the Shida test…it’s pretty much run of the mill stuff. Lots of emphasis on chengyu, idioms and other non-standard stuff. Example: the “san chi” you get at Beijing roast duck restaurants. You could know Chinese quite well without knowing THAT, or know little Chinese but have eaten a lot of duck… :unamused:

Someone was asking suggestions about reading material.

I just came across Time magazine, Youth edition, in the mag stands.

The topics aren’t so bad. this one has Alaska, Ghosts, Incredible Hulk, and the failure of Journalism a la Jayson B.

The columns are written with English and Chinese side-by-side with vocab lists. Some of the vocab can be useful in everyday conversation and not too arcane, inaccessible, or slang. Both the Chinese and English are written in a simple fashion (wish I could say the same of a lot of adults who think that more is better, more complex is more sophisticated…hello verbal diarrhea)

I would recommend a look-see if this is suitable for your learning needs.
No, I don’t work for Time although that sounds alright.

What’s run o’ the mill in the Chinese testing category? I don’t know of any other schools that offer proficiency tests. Sure, Wenhua and Taida have their own placement schemes, but only for those already enrolled … if you wanna play, you gotta pay. I heard that TLI offers a no-obligation proficiency test, but when I asked I was told it’s only given every 6 months.

There just aren’t that many options for proficiency tests offered to the public. Judging by this thread, some people think that online character-based tests are the only option.

Perhaps standardized testing ( :shock: ) of Chinese is another area where Taiwan needs to do some catching up. China has the HSK (Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi), already becoming a de-facto standard around the world, but it uses only simplified characters.

I took the intermediate Shida placement test, and it didn’t put too much emphasis on idioms or esoteric cultural knowledge, but of course you cannot strip all cultural content from such a test. It was administered in the audio-lab, with rows of desks each equipped with an ancient tape-deck and earphones. The 1st section consisted of listening to passages, generic stuff about sightseeing, the environment, and situational dialogs, with questions about each passage. House rules forbade use of the Pause and Rewind buttons :o , but fortunately the lady in charge didn’t pay any attention to the loud clicking noises eminating from my cubicle. The 2nd part was reading only, with multiple choice questions. About 90 minutes overall.

Not sure how different this experimental proficiency test is, but bottom line, it’s certainly worth a try, if for no other reason than for lack of other options.

Wix, I’m very much the same.

Milty, I’m sure you can polish off the 3000 in three months. The problem is knowing them well enoguht to really remember them. I think you’re right though. the way to do it is get it doen as quickly as possible so you can start reading something and then not have to worry about learing them anymore (because you’re learning by reading).

You see I got up to where you are pretty quickly, but then when I slacked off I forgot so much. Last time I studied I git up to 1500-2000 characters, but I’m still a long way from reading a newspaper, I think the problem is that a lot fo the stuff that you need to read is stuff you don’t encounter in spoken language so even if your spoken Chiense is ‘ahead’ of your written, you still don’t have the vocab to put those characters together to make words and you’re stuck their going, “now does this go with the character before it or after it?”.

One thing that I thought might be useful would be a young adults book (as opposed to a picture book). I bought the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (two versions - one with pinyin and one without) which will be the first thing I look at next time I get the urge (and time) to study. I figure since I’ve read the English version 9 times I don’t need to worry about trying to figure out what’s going on and can just get on wtih reading it.

Another idea is watching movies with subtitles. Pcik a movie you’ve seen before, so you don’t have to focus on the plot and see how often you can read the whole subtitle before it disapears. Having the Chiense spoken on a Chinese movie will help, and having the English meaning in a Western movie will help too.

I think my main point before I started writing this was going to be something like forget newspapers - they’re a waste of time.

Brian

100% agree. Who made reading newspapers the level everyone should want to attain? I’ll probably spend the majority of my time reading comic books and old ghost stories. If I want the news (a very rare occasion), I assume I’ll read it in English.

I started all this Chinese reading business because of an interest in Chinese medicine and things like that, definitely not the newspaper.

Booya!

I did the test and they gave me 2150. Keew-el. :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

Scored 18/18 ont he easy ones 17/18 on the next ones, 15/18 on the toughies and 6/18 on the really hard ones.

Actually I think the test was too easy. My usual measure of can I read it and write it (given a meaning and pinyin) would proabbly only give me 1000-1500 these days, and if you were going to be real tough and make me know the tone I’d be down real low. With this test I was able to guess quite a few ("that looks more like a jiao than a xie, po li or dao - let’s see some water and a knife hmm … etc).

Considering I haven’t studied in a year or two it was just the test for me as there are so many words that leave me going “now is it zhi or zhen that has the two bits in the top”, that I only can distinguish if I’m up to date with the study.

But maybe it’s good like that because when you’re reading there’s a bit of context and stuff, so guesswork is allowed.

Oh yeah. You have to take the test at the advanced level. I took it at lower intermediate and only scored 637.

So, apparentyl i know 2150 charcters and I’m a long long way from reading the newspaper, even if it’s just Guoyu Ribao.

Brian

HSK means Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi and not Hong Kong Shuiping Kaoshi…that wouldn’t make much sense, would it…

3108

18 18 17 13 (72 characters tested)

I haven’t studied Chinese or used it at work since 1998. I reckon in 1997 I would have known another 1,000 more characters. A very many of the characters in the test were extremely basic, it wasn’t until the last set that I encountered characters I’d never seen before. I’m not sure how scientific this is - I know my reading is very poor now compared to what it used to be. I don’t reckon I really “know” 3000 characters.

university of hawaii has some on-line programs. here is a link for the 300 level pre-test:

nflrc.hawaii.edu/project/399info.html

If I memorised all the questions to get a higher rating, would that be cheating? :wink:

Brian

Problem is, characters are not the same as knowing words.

You might know “sand” sha1 and “eyes” yan3, but you wouldn’t know that sha1yan3 was “trachoma”…same is true for many compounds. In some cases the sum of the parts is what the compound means, but not always. Plus, you can know all the characters in the world, but if you don’t know the syntax (grammar) of the language (I mean have it internalized, not have learned about it) you won’t comprehend how the characters are working together to express meaning.

I say Shida’s test is run of the mill because they have not exerted themselves to avoid common problems such as testing two things with the same test item. You can’t, for example, give a reading passage, and then ask, “Which of the following chengyu best sums up the meaning of this passage?” Are you testing whether the student knows the meaning of the chengyu or of the passage? A test item should measure one and only one thing, otherwise it doesn’t impart any useful information to the examiner.

You can try. Tell us if it works. 30 a day seems too high to me.
Maybe you have more time than me.

In France, students of Chinese are requested 20 characters a day and
that sounds more reasonable.

I did 12 a day at the beginning and found that I was forgetting
those learnt two weeks before, so I think you need to revisit the old
ones or check what you actually remember after severals weeks of
learning them.

I still think it’s useful to do it, at least for the 1000 more frequent
characters, optimum being perhaps 2000.

and it certainly gets easier after a while.
I did that for several months and then switched to reading fiction.
It’s more interesting and closer to spoken Chinese than press articles,
and there is a wide range of general vocabulary.

At the moment, for each full page I read in Chinese (author: Chen2
Ruo4Ti1; average difficulty) I meet about twenty characters that I need
to check in the dictionary (besides new words). As I don’t find more
than half of them in the 4,800-character dictionary I use, I
also use the Far East with 7,300 characters (and there I almost always find the character I’m looking for).

EB

[quote=“speakpigeon”]You can try. Tell us if it works. 30 a day seems too high to me.
Maybe you have more time than me.[/quote]
Probably not, just a different system for flash cards. It probably takes me about an hour a day to go through them all (not in a single sitting, just here and there).

clavisinica.com/ct-applet.html

I took this test last week and it gave me a score of 1200 (and some change, that was the intermediate level). I was about to post about how acurate it was, but then I took it again today at the expert level and scored 2419, (18 18 15 8) which is way off.

I found that it is easy to guess the the sound and meaning (from the ones they let you choose from) once you know a lot of characters. I think the test would be more acurate if they left an option to mark “I don’t know” so you couldn’t guess the answer.

Very true, but when it comes to reading, if you can’t recognize the character you definitely can not recognize the word. Also, being able to recognize the characters helps doing a dictionary search for the word. By knowing the pronunciation it’s really easy look words up in the dictionary.

[quote=“miltownkid”]http://www.clavisinica.com/ct-applet.html

I took this test last week and it gave me a score of 1200 (and some change, that was the intermediate level). I was about to post about how acurate it was, but then I took it again today at the expert level and scored 2419, (18 18 15 8) which is way off.

I found that it is easy to guess the the sound and meaning (from the ones they let you choose from) once you know a lot of characters. I think the test would be more acurate if they left an option to mark “I don’t know” so you couldn’t guess the answer.[/quote]
Just notced that I can hit the continue button without making a selection. I think that would fix thing right up.

[quote=“miltownkid”]

Very true, but when it comes to reading, if you can’t recognize the character you definitely can not recognize the word. Also, being able to recognize the characters helps doing a dictionary search for the word. By knowing the pronunciation it’s really easy look words up in the dictionary.[/quote]

Not entirely true. If your spoken Mandarin is already very proficient you may be able to guess words even if you don’t all the constituent characters. This is one of the reasons that I think it’s better to concentrate on speaking Mandarin for the first couple of years.

[quote=“Feiren”][quote=“miltownkid”]

Very true, but when it comes to reading, if you can’t recognize the character you definitely can not recognize the word. Also, being able to recognize the characters helps doing a dictionary search for the word. By knowing the pronunciation it’s really easy look words up in the dictionary.[/quote]

Not entirely true… [/quote]

Just to add to that, I know countless words for which I couldn’t tell you what at least one of the consituent characters “mean”. When reading, there are also words I know but I don’t know how to pronounce at least one of the characters of. Beyond a basic level, setting learning the meanings and pronunciations of characters as your goal is a roundabout way to learn the language, spoken or written.

I’ve thought about this a while and I think it’ll be easier for me to covert my reading knowledge into spoken (I could be wrong though). In reality I’m working on both at the same time, but tend to focus more on reading now. My spoken Mandarin is not good, but I’m able to guess words when reading (comic books that is). In this case I have no idea what the pronunciation of the characters are, but from the context of what’s written (and the pictures :wink: ) I know what it means.

It’s by no means my only metric for knowledge of the language, but I do know that native speakers know the meaning and pronunciation of the most frequently used characters. And it’s not exactly something that’s going to take a long time to achieve. What I assume will happen (and to an extent has already started) is I will first be studying all these characters, then start reading and learning more vocabulary and in the end totally forget about all the character stuff because I’ll just be reading (books, magazines, etc.) I expect the whole process to take no longer then 2 years (actually much less).

In any other (romanized) language it would take less then a year (for most people) to become very proficient at reading. The only thing that stops Chinese (Mandarin) from being this way is its use of characters. Since it’s the characters that keep people from being able to read the newspaper (and other media) I think character knowledge must be important.

Reading these replies makes me a more firm believer in Mandarins ability to be romanized. If you’re just going to guess the meanings or know what it means but not know how to pronounce it, what’s the point (of all these characters)?

Didn’t those cats (people) back in the day memorize 50,000+ characters and the strokes (maybe slight exageration)? 3-5,000 should be a cake walk.

Why would you think this? Any difficult task is made simpler if you divide it into smaller tasks. When you learn characters without having already mastered the spoken words, you have to learn the meaning, pronunciation, and usage along with the glyph.

I would suggest reducing the amount of time you spend writing characters by about 75% and spending that time in bars instead (seriously). You’ll learn far more Chinese and hopefully have some fun at the same time Do get up for class though :slight_smile: Chatting with the secretaries where you work or signing up for cooking classes are acceptable alternatives. The point is that you need to find a place with taiwanese people who have the time and inclination to talk to you

Don’t be one of these foreigners who spends two years here madly copying charcters and making flashcards in his lonely garret and then leaves without being able to string togethr a coherent sentence.

I can’t. I stopped writing characters a long time ago.

Don’t worry, I garuntee you I won’t. I’ll actually be making steps towards more time spent speaking soon. I plan on checking out that toastmasters thing or find some other thing to do that will be all in Chinese. I already have a taiji class with locals. I’m not worried about the progress of my speaking (or reading), I’m just sharing my experiences.

Now, back to the character thing. I just finished a couple of tests (all for the sake of science). :wink:
This page again [CLICK HERE]
First, I had a local try taking the test. Before they finished I was told a number of times about how stupid this test is because single characters don’t make any sense. Because the test is in English using pinyin with English definitions we ran into a few snags (I won’t get into details), but there was never a problem determaning the sound element.

Score 18 18 17 16 for a toal of 3470. I actually marked one of them incorrectly on accident :blush: . Also, I was told that the test was very easy, had it been in Chinese there would have been no problem answering the questions. There was also the suggestion that using 2 characters for a test like this would make more sense. I can’t say that I don’t agree.

The second test consisted of me going through the whole thing and marking them all correct. I noticed a few problems. They had some characters that have 2 pronunciations and sometimes their difinitions were very unclear. I still think it’s a pretty cool test.

Score 18 18 18 18 for a total of 3755

At least now I now how many characters there are. :laughing:

Conclusion:

Knowing the sound and meaning element of individual characters is not crucial for reading, but one should be able to identify the sound element of every character when reading (I think).

I don’t think someone needs to study every character and it’s meaning, but someone who is very proficient at reading should be able to stomp all over a test like this.

In the end, if someone is on a mission to read Chinese, no matter how they do it, it’s gonna take a good chunk of time and energy to get to a confortable level.

I will continue my character quest. I think I have much more to gain then lose.

I think you’re comparing apples and oranges here.

To learn to read “baihuawen” or prose written in a normal “spoken” style, then the barrier is recognizing the characters, because you should then be able to match the recognized visual forms of the characters to the words you already know how to manage in the spoken language (spoken language is still primary, however.) Reading and writing in a language that uses vernacular literature, in 99 percent of cases, are just ways to freeze speech on the page in a more convenient form.

However, newspapers are definitely NOT frozen speech. Newspapers take elements of spoken Chinese, literary (wenyanwen) Chinese, and terrifying abbreviations. Back when they used to limit the number of pages in the newspaper, I had more sympathy for this kind of thing… :laughing: But now they have plenty of space!

So for newspapers, my suggestion is first to learn spoken Chinese to a reasonable level, then learn to read vernacular literature, THEN finally get somebody to sit down with you and just read through newspaper articles, explaining the correspondence between the newspaper form and the forms of the language you already know. If you simply memorize X thousand charactesr and try to make out what the newspaper is saying, to me you might as well be reading a Japanese newspaper and saying, “Well, I know a lot of the kanji, so I can make out what they’re talking about.” You’ll miss all the nuance (if we are charitably assuming there is nuance there, of course. :wink: )

Just my NT$0.66 but been there, done that…from both sides

Terry