Counting Characters and Such
Praxis, the company behind the LanguagePod series, has started a cool new blog called Learning on Your Terms. It's written by John Biesnecker, a veteran of the China expat blogging scene and a Praxis employee. For insight into learning a foreign language (not just Chinese), there's a lot of interesting material there.
Through a link on this post I found a list of all Chinese characters by frequency, all the way up to 10,000 or so.
As I mentioned in my first ever post for Lost Laowai, there isn't a magical number of characters one has to know to achieve "fluency", and in any case few people actually can quantify their own personal "character count". I've always been morbidly curious, anyway, so for fun I read through the list.
Characters 1-1,250- no problem.
1,250-2,250- iffy. Know some, don't know others
2,250-3,000- few and far between
3,000-10,000- nada
John guesses 3,500 characters are necessary to achieve proficiency, though as we know characters don't really matter, words do. So while I was feeling sorry for myself a bit, I remembered that about a year ago I'd probably be limited to 200, and a year before that no more than 40. So hey- progress is progress!
August 26th, 2008 - 14:29
Hey Matt, thanks for the link! That 3500 is kind of a guess, too, but it seems to mesh about right with my experience. As I pushed up through 3000+ (not according to that list, just in general) the frequency of discovering a word that I didn’t know that also had characters I didn’t know fell dramatically. Of course there are still a ton of words I don’t know, and even more usage/colocation things I stumble on, but I’m getting there.
You will, too — it’s just the sort of thing you have to trudge through, progressing bit by bit until you get to a place at which you’re comfortable.
August 26th, 2008 - 15:48
And on October 21, 1999, I was stone cold flat out illiterate. Now that was a humbling experience.
Yeah, it’s words not characters, but you have to know the characters to get the words, but a straight out character count is meaningless. A character count weighted by that frequency list would be more useful, but still no hard and fast measure of literacy. You can read Italian texts that include words you don’t know and still understand it pretty close to perfectly (and sometimes get it completely wrong because the words you didn’t know were more important than you realised), and I can do the same in French; Chinese is no different (although a little more intimidating).