How many Chinese characters do you know?

Language Learning Chinese
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Kind of, but not really. Here’s my charted path to Chinese victory.

Character recognition, spoken, listening and reading are all being worked on now. I believe the book I’m using for reading is using this literary (wenyanwen) coupled with terrifying abreviations, and I like it a lot. It has peoms written by Dufu and Libai, old ghost stories and things like that.

I’m not far from being able to breeze through the childrens newspaper, the adult one might be a big step up, but it’s not a great concern of mine since news doesn’t really interest me. My reason for memorizing all these characters is because I don’t like reading something and running to a “word” I can’t read (even if I don’t know what it means).

I very happy with my progress thus far. I started out in Janurary wanting to self study my way into Book 2 shang of the Shida series and start school at Shida in September. Now, book 3 looks kind of easy (I’m just lacking a lot of vocab./idioms and I’m really good at cramming those). My grammar sucks, but is rapidly improving. I have a one track mind, that’s why I’m heavily focused on learning characters. I plan on cramming characters, then cram vocabulary and in the end work on grammar/speaking and writing.

Where I am now and with the speed I’ve been taking in new material I just feel like it’s a matter of time (and not a lot).

Also for me (everybody’s mind works differently) learning all of these characters is greatly improving my vocabulary (as a side effect). Anytime I hear a word I don’t know I can ask what characters make up that word. Watching TV (in Chinese) helps me learning a lot of new vocab. I’ll hear and read something then try to start uing it right away. Well enoguh blabber, like I said, everyone is different, I found a way that’s working well for me.

42

I’m done with the experiment. 3000 is possible in 2 months or less. But I wouldn’t suggest doing it unless you can already speak.

43

To mangalica, yes John DeFrancis is still alive (I

44

just a few years back he was still to be seen in the hallways at U of Hawaii most everyday. stupid *ss me was too intimidated to chat him up.

he wore/wears his years well.

45

I know at least 2,000 now, but unfortunately this is not sufficient to read an adult book or the newspaper. Increasing your vocabulary is very important - learning the characters in isolation is not enough. Practice in figuring out the meaning of a text is also necessary - this means grammar. For a long time now I’ve been able to pronounce 95% of the characters in signs, random sentences in books, headlines, subtitles, etc., but unfortunately most of the time I can’t figure out what the sentence means.

46

First, I agree with ironlady that the ShiDa proficiency test has a fair bit of non-standard stuff, like somewhat too many idioms :expressionless: , and wasn

47

Personally I don’t know any chinese characters personally. My friends introduced me to some but we had nothing in common so we drifted apart…