How many Chinese characters do you need to know? (to READ Chinese)

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Title	:	How many Chinese characters do you need to know? (to READ Chinese)
Lasting	:	13.01
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So, how many radicals would you need to learn to know 750 characters? I have not yet found a prioritized list of radicals for learning
Comment from : @davidgiraitis2320

I use the skritter app to learn Chinese words and characters According to the app, I'm at 1400 words, 525 characters I've completed HSK 4 and am early in HSK 5 level I can read simple things like youtube comments (with some help from a dictionary) I'm excited to hit 750 soon!
Comment from : @wpelfeta

Native cantonese speaker but did learn 6 years of Mandarin Took the test and scored 3700
Comment from : @jeremylow7757

1500 characters is about my level, tried children's books and the ugly duckling killed me with all their ponds, barns, etc never learned those words in class
Comment from : @iopqu

Well, sorry, but if you know 0 Chinese, 500 characters is not a pretty number It's actually a great achievement
Comment from : @Beehive66

不知道你有没有学习文言文，如果学习了一定数量的文言文后，不是说你的识字量上升了，而是你真正弄明白了汉语的内在逻辑了，很多字没有学过就已经认识了。我们从初中开始学习文言文，到高中毕业学习大概100篇左右的文言文。
Comment from : @xixi-t6n

The ratio of characters to words is very low compared to other languages, which makes it harder to learn to read
Comment from : @linayao1111

dang, and i was proud of my 150 words haha
Comment from : @klemute777

This is by far the most helpful - and honest - video about how many characters you need to knowbrThe question is, what counts as "knowing"? Is it being able to write that character from memory? Or know what it looks like, but not being able to write it? Or kind of knowing what it looks like? Or recognising it when it's paired with another character you know to make a word there are many shades of "knowing" a character I think
Comment from : @osantiagues

Thanks,your videos are very valluable❤
Comment from : @shisuimarutachi

You look like a high schooler not like a guy that finished college
Comment from : @கோபிசுதாகர்

this makes me want to cry
Comment from : @Samlowkiapeng1888

I learned around 7,000 words in Chinese, including about 1,200 traditional characters and about 800 simplified characters, because the book I was using is excellent for compound words The book is Chinese Reader (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) by De Francis
Comment from : @overlordartorius6688

thank you for saving time
Comment from : @scidro1115

Why u do me like this ? I've only started learning 汉语, around Hsk1-15 and u telling me HSK 6 is a middle schooler ?
Comment from : @thisonelooksangry

人 add stroke to change words 大，天。大 expand 头，买，卖，实在。人 add 丷 expand 火，灭，灾
Comment from : @AJLIM-q9c

Using radical method 部首 able to simplify learn Eg 木 extend to 林 and 森林。林extend to 麻(大麻)，糜烂，磨，摩擦，禁，梦，梵蒂冈，彬彬有礼。。need 100 only
Comment from : @AJLIM-q9c

I love the Chinese language and American English, I always try to study!
Comment from : @GoldenHorse2024

0
Comment from : @JohnJTraston

Yes please make videos on the logic of Chinese characters
Comment from : @kp8955

I’m only at 300, it’s not bad for only a year into studying
Comment from : @TheAlana

Chinese is the hardest It requires dedication discipline and hard work to become a decent speaker Many foreigners think they are good, when there grammar, word choice and especially the pronounciation actually sucks… Bitter truth😂
Comment from : @dingdingnian288

The Chinese writing system seems very inferior to the writing system used in the West I don't think I will ever attempt to learn that language (Chinese) I am not a hater, I just said what I think
Comment from : @ElvisNoris-zp1jm

Can I pick up Chinese chicks with iTalki?
Comment from : @Hellohellohello803

i'm at 150 already yay :')
Comment from : @rusope1050

8:34 Thats what she said
Comment from : @Cedric_Skywaka

I’m currently reading 十宗罪 but I still need to use a dictionary There’s a lot of words outside the HSK but it feels like a real accomplishment Just being able to understand and slowly improve is nice
Comment from : @liyuqi8092

is it possible to learn to only read Chinese, but not to speak it? I mean knowing the meaning of characters and compound words but not knowing how to pronounce them or not knowing the language itself?
Comment from : @nitsum8874

9:00 The 大 in 大夫 can also be pronounced da4 It's only pronounced dai4 when 大夫 means doctor
Comment from : @Tyrhonius

I truly believe I am the worst Chinese student who keeps trying After three years of study I currently know about 300 characters and plan to keep going 谢谢老师我觉得你很好!!!!
Comment from : @CharlesBender-or9mv

Can group all Chinese character into 100 Eg group 人☞write all character pattern with 人。二☞write all character pattern with 二。Eg 工，土干士云亏会。。
Comment from : @ahjit7283

I often wonder if the structure of the characters could be built into the teaching method rather than being something you are left to figure out on your own Maybe vocabulary lists could be structured around shared radicals or something like that?
Comment from : @rvaughanwilliams1988

hearing you speak english and korean and knowing you know chinese is nice in india we all need to know 2 or 3 languagues, just to survivelong live polyglotism (is polygloty a word?)
Comment from : @owl6218

I spend a lot of time using google translate and a character dictionary trying to demystify chinese characters The character dictionary allows me to dissect the character into components all the way down to the simplest radicals Endless rabbit hole Was looking at all characters that contain 古, for example 胡 is a character that means wild, reckless (adverb, may be) Now, how does old, moon come to mean wild🙃🙃? i get it they need some unique representation for the word (idea) reckless, which they have generate using these pre-existing characters In other languages, the sound of the word ('reckless') stores the meaning In chinese a unique symbol stores that meaning Anyway, it is fun to sometimes use the radicals present to guess what the character may stand for But some times the combination of radicals present appears random, and funny This 枯 (ku), meaning 'withered', 'dried', on the other hand is very satisfying - old tree is 'withered' I laughed when I realized 姑 is 'paternal aunt' or 'husband's mother' 'aunt' is 'old woman'? haha Also the cultural insight is price less Did they have the practice of marrying women to their paternal aunt's son? Because, in south india, they do have this practice, and the relationship term for 'husband's mother' is indeed 'paternal aunt'
Comment from : @owl6218

Can you read 文言文 though? 🤨brNot a real chinese
Comment from : @markusoreos233

China Pakistan brothers
Comment from : @tayyabiftikhar4757

Is it useful to know the meaning of characters on their own? Ive been learning Chinese for a while now and I had the impression that knowing a single isolated character is not very helpful because a large majority of words are made up of two characters Is the meaning of a two-character word so apparent from the single characters its made up of? So far I just assumed that a word made of two characters probably has a very different meaning and that I wouldn't be able to figure it out just from context and knowing the individual charactersbrDoes anyone have experience with this?
Comment from : @Xsomono

There is a huge difference in "how many words native speakers know" because nobody can agree on how to count a "word"brFor example, if you know the word "fire" is that 1 word? or 4 words? (1 the hot red thing, 2 to dismiss someone from their job, 3 passion, 4 amazing) And if we already counted "up," should we count "fire up" as a separate word? So depending on how you count, a native speaker could know about 10,000 words, or well over 60,000 br(Of course, other big factors are job and hobbies a medical doctor with a love of poetry probably knows way more words than a typical person)
Comment from : @doteigo

In Linguistics people say a native speaker knows about 20k-60k root words in one's mother language 20k would be the "active" vocabulary (the words the person does speak in daily life) plus 40k "passive" vocabulary (the person knows the words but don't use them daily)brbrAbout HSK, in my own research, HSK 20 level 6 requires about 2,750 characters and the new HSK 30 level 9 requires about 3k
Comment from : @enricobrasil

3000常用字基本就可以沟通了
Comment from : @stevel2435

moral of the story, breaking down 'words' to their sound components was a brilliant solution Did all languages start as 'picto/ideo-grams'? (I wonder) (I'll ask chatgpt :P )
Comment from : @AS-wi6hr

1500 to read at a 1st grade level bruh lol
Comment from : @swaystar1235

你很聪明！I only know 4 characters/3 words 😂 Honestly, what a GREAT video!!! I'm trying to learn Chinese and love your videos! Keep making them!
Comment from : @stephenreiss7181

Wow!!! Learning 750 Chinese characters to be able to read a little more than kids books, what a dream!! It will take timelong time I have a question Would the use of Pinyin to begin, hurt my learning of reading/writing Chinese? Your videos are great Thank you for helping us out to learn
Comment from : @Poopa-lb7mb

Does anyone know of any bilingual (EN/CH) textbook or textbook series that I can use to learn 10,000 high-frequency words with example sentences for each word?
Comment from : @AhmedEraj-fo7ou

if you can read local news on newspaper with ease, your Chinese language proficiency is more than enough for daily use
Comment from : @IsaacChoo88

Me watching this knowing 12 characters 🙂
Comment from : @caioverneck9661

This video was really encouraging!brI started learning Mandarin around July 5th, 2023 and as of today, I've got just over 400 words in my flashcard app! I'm so close to that 750 mark!brI already have an iTalki teacher lined up for when the time is rightbrWow! SO EXCITED!
Comment from : @dannysmooth8442

I want to save almost all off your videos in my favorite saves! And i want to say it Just to let you know that how much I love the information you give and how can these make a new Chinese leaderner happy!(and some times scared'-')
Comment from : @reyhan963

Turned into a salesman like in a south park episode 😂
Comment from : @mawcel

So just want to be clear: he is talking about characters and not actual words right? 2000 characters mean one could probably know 5000 words!?
Comment from : @SuperGuitarboyz

So glad I didnt have to learn this growing up lol
Comment from : @ActionDaily

What frequency list should I use for the 750 word mark?
Comment from : @stevenalexander3032

But, wot If u is learning Traditional Chinese?
Comment from : @morejoy5188

Tradition is nice but why do you think that China does not make a transition to an alphabet?brIt would be make things so much simplerit would life a huge obsolete burden from chinese educationbrIt is like we italians were still writing numbers in the Roman characters
Comment from : @Tech_Publica

I found when I hit around 2800 (traditional) characters, the ratio for new words to new characters changed quite significantly, it gets very satisfying when so many new words are just two old words glued together I'm now at 3300 characters (8600 words) which apparently puts me around the level of a grade 6 kid 🤓 I still miss a lot of details reading YA novels though 😅
Comment from : @quexybompq

5000
Comment from : @arminebner2846

How can i study my character knowledge? Most leaning apps are mostly vocab
Comment from : @cryo

As someone who is trying to learn chinese to read webnovels and chinese novels: F*ck!
Comment from : @catman4859

I know about 10 characters 😂
Comment from : @lnaru

Awesome video - thank you
Comment from : @cocoanutte

Proportionally you need a vocabulary of 10k words for 3000 hanziOr even more to make any sense if a long news paper article
Comment from : @Calagat

I unearthed a text file of Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, and he only uses 3516 total characters, of which the top 2000 cover 99brbr(I think high word counts treat variants separately, like if you know "cup" and "cups" you know two words)
Comment from : @muskyoxes

AS A CHINESE, I JUST KNOW ABOUT 500 COMMON CHINESE CHARACTERS
Comment from : @hfdennycheng9010

great video! i am the 10,000th view :D
Comment from : @azadsprogramm

taking the HSK6 is basically useless
Comment from : @DavidYoung-uu3yj

我觉得小学水平就够了，也就是800字基本就没问题了。
Comment from : @strategicfooyouagencyfirst8197

I took this english word test out of curiosity and i feel like all the fancy words that id did know, i knew from playing dnd Maybe you just have to play more dnd :P brI got 24000 but i feel like this can not be true because i search for words while speaking on a regularly so it is probably just shifted upwards because of the fancy words from dndbrOn the other hand i also search for words while speaking my native language so maybe i am just slow
Comment from : @ElliLovett

As you say, people wrongly equate characters with words This is an error If you take just 12 characters, you can get many, many words (two-character meanings) And you will not necessarily understand those words So you're right brSome people say that 2,500 words in English will tell you most of the English language They're wrong It's not true They ignore the many meanings of common words, eg, "make," which goes into make-up, make out, make away with, make do, make up (invent), make you do something, make your way through, etcbrThat said, once you have 3,000 words, you can infer a lot of partial meanings
Comment from : @turkmusik

Dear Who, I found your YT videos this morning I have watching all day I still don't know your name Let me ask: In your opinion, how important for world peace is it that Americans learn to think, read, and understand the Chinese language?
Comment from : @oldsachem

Now I know only around 2000 characters and I'm studying in a Chinese university together with native Chinese students, so I have to read native Chinese university level textbooks and novels with my only 2000 character levelI could understand 90 of textbooks contents but can't understand anything from novels, so you are right, literature is the hardest thing ever you could read in Chinese as a foreigner, and we are also required to learn Classical Chinese, which to me looks like a totally different language from modern Chinese, let's say, like the difference between English and LatinRegarding the learning process of characters, I started to see some repetitive patterns from my first 150 characters, but I didn't realise there is actually a logic behind them, so I continued to memorise them in the boring and inefficient "write every character 100 times" methodI think I already knew how to read 700-800 characters when I first learned about 六书 and the radicals Regarding conversation, I started texting my Chinese friends in Chinese since I passed HSK 3 (600 characters)
Comment from : @deacudaniel1635

In Taiwan you need to know 4800 characters to be treated as a literate person
Comment from : @TalaySeedam

Feels like the 750-character mark you found is the same as figuring out how the historical spelling systems of English or Tibetan workbrLearning to read each in the beginning is all brute force and acceptance that the patterns will show up laterbrbrBasically dark souls taught me the best language learning strategy: git gud
Comment from : @EchoLog

To answer your question about the number of words learned for effective communication, why don’t you contact the linguistics department of a college or university?
Comment from : @Mnogojazyk

Just learn pinyin
Comment from : @modmaker7617

I think you should use LingQ instead of Duolingo to learn Korean
Comment from : @ramikla_146

I would like to say though… as an art form, the characters excel But for practical day to day use… it’s impractical
Comment from : @1234-x4r

For whatever pitfalls Duolingo has, it made me read characters, and I really appreciate them for doing so Chinese became much easier once I could read them I wish I had a Chinese friend I could text in Mandarin🫠
Comment from : @acwright

Hi! I love the language (Chinese) but I also love the characters, for me as an artist those characters are art… my question how do you say and write the word “ART”? Thank you
Comment from : @vvjavviervv