HI I found this website that gives an approximation of how many chinese characters you know.Do you think this is accurate?
24 questions, advanced, traditional:
It says I know approximately 3624 characters.
19/24 correct, advanced. 2867 characters. Seemed a bit easy; my Chinese is not that good…
(Why I’m interested on Saturday night is another set of questions)
I did have some issues with their definitions. For example, I’ve only ever seen 奈 meaning “to endure”, “to withstand”, “to tolerate”; or as a phonetic, as in the first syllable of “nano”.
The website says I know 113 characters based on my performance on it. That is the biggest exaggeration I’ve ever, ever heard.
Not sure what definitions they offered you on that one; I’ve seen it used as “but” and “to do/deal with” as in “may o me, whatever to do?”…
I’m just starting the test now, but for 72 Q advanced traditional, it’s wasting my time by giving me 生 and 最 off the bat, no?
EDIT – a dozen characters later, it’s wasting my time with 正 民 看 and so on. If that’s “advanced”, I’m not going to bother. I quit.
I think this test is more for fun than an accurate reflection of how many characters you know. Having more patience than Dragonbones 
I went through the test four times, once at each level. Having got 100% right at the first level, it reckons I know 302 characters, then it said 706 at the second level, 1,846 at the third (which is probably quite close to the truth) and 2,178 at the fourth.
Obviously any kind of test like this is limited in what it’s testing for - some of the advanced characters I was able to puzzle out without really knowing the character (although I entered a blank on the test, just for honesty’s sake). Also correct pronunciation is important, but it’s possible to get reasonable scores on the test without knowing any tones.
So - a bit of fun, and probably a good idea not to take any results too seriously.
Well, it was taking about 25 agonizing seconds to load each item last night, which is why I had so little patience. It’s down to about 8 now, so I’m trying again.
I think if they rename the levels ‘beginner’, ‘intermediate beginner’ and ‘advanced beginner’ it would be more realistic. After all, it’s giving me the character 三 in the advanced test.
I will say that some of the definitions will stump a lot of students in those ranges because they aren’t necessarily the definitions learned at first. For example, the passive marker bei4 is defined elsewise. If you have studied even at a shallow level the etymology of each character, you’ll sail through it, though – or if you pay attention to the semantic components (you know, the “r” word…). 
[quote=“Dragonbones”]Well, it was taking about 25 agonizing seconds to load each item last night, which is why I had so little patience. It’s down to about 8 now, so I’m trying again.
I think if they rename the levels ‘beginner’, ‘intermediate beginner’ and ‘advanced beginner’ it would be more realistic. After all, it’s giving me the character 三 in the advanced test.
I will say that some of the definitions will stump a lot of students in those ranges because they aren’t necessarily the definitions learned at first. For example, the passive marker bei4 is defined elsewise. If you have studied even at a shallow level the etymology of each character, you’ll sail through it, though – or if you pay attention to the semantic components (you know, the “r” word…). :p[/quote]
The reason you’re getting simple characters to start is that it ranks them by frequency, with *** being the most frequent, down to no stars for the least frequent. Every test, even the ‘advanced’ one, starts out with ***-rated characters. The difference is that at the beginner level, it stays there, whereas at higher levels after giving you a few three-star characters it moves on to two, one and no-star zi.
I agree with Chris in that a couple of definitions were iffy. I think a better test would involve one typing the actual pinyin with tones. Otherwise, many of those characters essentially give away the pinyin by their phonetic components.
Yeah, I’m doing the longest version, and it kept giving me easy characters for the first half. Now I’m at character #60 and it’s giving me suitably difficult ones like
掣, 窘
and so on. 
I’ve missed one so far (martingale!), and have had to guess at a couple like
摻
, but got this one because the left semantic matched the option of ‘mix’ and the right phonetic matched the sound chan1.
Oh, and I would have gotten (successfully guessed, I should say) the damned martingale one if I’d bothered to look up the word martingale! I missed the English word, not the Chinese!!! :roflmao:
About typing tones, it would only work if could accept Taiwan tone standards in lieu of mainland ones (e.g. 期 being qi2 in Taiwan and qi1 the mainland). Maybe an option for Taiwan vs. mainland?
Anyway, it amazes me how many characters I readily know when paired with other characters, but look totally alien to me in isolation.
Yeah, that happens to me too, but I can still get them in a multiple choice format like this.
A lot of the characters on the advanced test seem really easy. If you get a perfect score on the advanced 72-character test, it still says you only know 3700+ characters.
Edit: Oops, I saw on the page the maximum number is actually 3755 on this test.
About typing tones, it would only work if could accept Taiwan tone standards in lieu of mainland ones (e.g. 期 being qi2 in Taiwan and qi1 the mainland). Maybe an option for Taiwan vs. mainland?[/quote]
The test can be designed to accept both versions as correct as well as any possible variations a la 破音字. Kinda like when grading SAT essays, both American and British spellings are acceptable (or so I’ve been told). As for 期, qi1 is also officially acceptable in Taiwan according to MOE’s own dictionary:
期
It would also help if the test did a proper job of converting the characters from simplified to traditional. You can tell that this test was designed in simplified characters and then simply used a cheap-o converter to come up with the traditional test. Case in point, one of the first 10 characters of the test for me was 愿, which is supposedly one of the easy ones. Although 愿 is a part of the traditional character set, it is not commonly used. However, it is a commonly used character in the simplified character set, use to represent the traditional character 願. In the traditional character set, 愿 does not mean “willing” or “wish” (which was the “correct” answer in the test), but rather is an adjective meaning “loyal” or “cautious”.
EDIT: For Chris’s sake, I think the test should have an option to use Tongyong Pinyin rather than sticking with Hanyu Pinyin exclusively.
Nooooooooooooo… Aaaaaarrrrrgghhhhhh! 
Death to tongyong…death to tongyong…whirrr…clack clack…clack…boom!
NO CARRIER
That’s evil of you. 
Mod note: extended discussion of romanization systems has been split off from this thread and can be found here.