1. Top 3000 Chinese Characters

Warning: Since Javascript is disabled in your browser, many features will not work. Learning the Most Commonly Used Chinese Characters Learning to read and write Chinese as a second language is indeed a difficult task. College-level courses introduce the students to about 500 in the first year and another 500 in the second year. However, it is generally accepted that one needs to know between 3000-4000 characters in order to be able to read a standard Chinese newspaper. For those of us in the learning mode this is a daunting challenge. How do we get there from way down here? How do we make sure that we are learning the most common ones first?

While we don't claim to know the answer to these questions, we have some ideas we'd like to share. Wouldn't it make sense to ensure that we are learning the most frequently used characters (and words) first? There have been several attempt to identify the most frequently used Chinese characters. The Chinese Government itself publicized one such list in 1998.

In another study analyzed Internet postings from 1993 and 1994 amounting to almost 172 million characters. Additional analysis was perfomed. Since the study used Big5 encoded data, the results are more relevant to those interested in traditional Chinese characters. A more recent analysis has been performed by using web publications, including online versions of works written before 1911 (which accounted for 25% of the data). The data amounted to over 258 million characters encoded in GB2312 and GB13000. Accordingly, the results have been summarized using simplified Chinese characters. One major improvement of this study is that it also identified the most frequently used bigrams, most of which should be two-character words.

2000 of the Most Common Characters in Mandarin Chinese. Chinese aracters have been in use for. Ri Harbaugh’s “Chinese Characters: A Genealogy. Chinese Characters. Chinese, on the other hand, has a script that is, in itself. Vocabulary of over 3000 characters, enough to read. MANDARIN CHINESE VOCABULARY AND CHINESE CHARACTERS. Candidates will not have to read the word in Chinese characters at this level. They must, however.

The statistical data also offers some hope. Although, 3000-400 characters is still a mind-boggling number of symbols to memorize, the following table indicates that at least partial understanding is achievable with a smaller set. Cumulative Character Frequency for the Top N Characters Characters Huang's 1994 results Da's 2004 results Top 250 characters 64.4% 57.1% Top 500 characters 79.2% 72.1% Top 1000 characters 91.1% 86.2% Top 1500 characters 95.7% 92.4% Top 2000 characters 97.9% 95.6% Top 3000 characters 99.4% 98.3% The above table tells us that the top 1000 characters account for between 86% and 91% of the characters occurring in the real world. Assuming, with great hope, that there is a good correlation between the top 1000 characters found in these studies and the 1000 characters that most second year college students are supposed to master, we can conclude that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Finally, while we wouldn't advocate studying characters solely based on their high frequency, we believe that studying such lists is a reasonable supplement to conventional study programs. Such lists also provide a sense of just where one is on the path to full Chinese literacy. The results from the above studies have been used to generate two different sets of flashcards. The is based on C.H. Tsai's combined 1993-1994 data.

Top 3000 Chinese Characters

The is based on Jun Da's combined classical and modern Chinese data, which has the advantage of being based on more recent data as well as more formal publications. Which one should you use?

In the overall scope of things, it probably doesn't matter. In fact, the flashcards will let you switch to the alternate script. However, since simplified characters potentially map to multiple traditional characters, there is possibility of a conversion error. For this reason, we recommend using the first list for those primarily interested in the traditional script and the second for those interested in the simplified script.

We also have flashcards for the character lists used by primary schools in and, which might be a good to comparing your reading level compared to school children in those areas. Finally, it is also worth mentioning the and by James Heisig and Timothy Richardson. Unlike most Chinese textbooks, these are focused solely on learning the characters.

The Most Common Chinese Characters Here we are going to make a compilation of the most frequently used characters in modern, simplified Chinese. The most common Chinese characters are put in order of frequency from the highest to the lowest. The list is created using statistic list of Chinese characters and dictionaries. All characters are presented in falling statistical order. Pronunciations are specified according to Pinyin and for some characters a number of different possible pronunciations are given. Examples of common words are given. This list of the most common Chinese characters is based on ’s research.

He presents detailed statistics for the use of Chinese characters on his web-sites.