<p>I had heard various numbers over the years, so I guessed at 4000 and generated computer flashcards for reading and writing all the Chinese vocabulary I'll need for the foreseeable future. There are currently 32614 cards with 4166 characters and 18385 words. They are divided into separate files, each with about 100 cards in it. You can download the flashcards for the first 700 characters from <a href="http://code.google.com/p/donkirkby/wiki/ChineseVocabulary" rel="noreferrer">my Google Code page</a>. I'll publish the remaining characters after I'm happy with the current set. </p>

<p>The cards cover English definition, simplified character, traditional character, and pinyin pronunciation of each character, as well as the most common words using those characters.</p>

<p>The software is <a href="http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/" rel="noreferrer">Mnemosyne</a>, which uses the spaced repetition technique to schedule when you review the cards you already know. It's not fast, but it seems to stick a lot better than manually reviewing vocabulary lists.</p>

<p>Here's a screenshot:</p>

<p><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/4SH02.png" alt="Mnemosyne screenshot"></p>

<p>In a couple of more recent projects, I tried to build some tools to help with reading practice. I sieved through Chinese text looking for sentences that use only the characters I know. My first attempt was with <a href="http://code.google.com/p/donkirkby/wiki/ChineseTweets" rel="noreferrer">Twitter updates</a>, but it was kind of a slow process to find and translate them. More recently, I found a huge collection of translated sentences on <a href="http://tatoeba.org" rel="noreferrer">Tatoeba</a>. I've collected all the sentences that used the 500 most common traditional characters and posted them on <a href="http://donkirkby.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/frequency-flashcards/sentence-rank/output/sentences.html" rel="noreferrer">my Google Code page</a>. They're sorted with the most common characters at the start of the page.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-05-14T21:28:21.560Z
Also http://www.skritter.com/
Michael Robinson
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-14T09:19:17.280Z
Oh my! Seems like a great tool, thanks for sharing!
dr Hannibal Lecter
CC BY-SA 3.0
2018-03-06T14:29:46.420Z
Also Inkstone: https://www.skishore.me/inkstone/
d33tah
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-14T01:18:38.030Z
2011-12-14T07:08:35.457Z
2011-12-14T07:08:35.457Z
Don Kirkby
<p>If you want to have a quantitative answer you can look at the commulative character frequencies of larger Chinese text corpora. If compiled a list of the most common Chinese characters <a href="http://git.io/hanzifreq" rel="noreferrer">here</a> (using <a href="https://github.com/czielinski/hanzifreq" rel="noreferrer">this code</a>).</p>

<p>There you can see that if you know the 100 most common characters, you can recognize one third of the characters on Wikipedia. If you know the most common 500 characters, you can read two thirds, with 1000 characters 83% and with 2000 characters 94%.</p>

<p>These numbers differ of course depending on the text corpus and the numbers quoted here are valid for the Chinese Wikipedia.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-07-08T08:17:30.610Z
2015-07-08T08:17:30.610Z
Christian Zielinski
<p>Based on my experience, about 2000 characters will give you command of most texts. Perhaps 4,000 will make you fluent. For the first 2,000, I recommend, <a href="https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0982232403" rel="nofollow noreferrer" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Chinese Characters: Learn &amp; Remember 2,178 Characters and Their Meanings</a>.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2011-12-13T22:32:05.660Z
2020-06-08T21:50:43.473Z
2020-06-08T21:50:43.473Z
Tom Au
<p>According to Zhonghua Zihai, the largest Chinese character dictionary, there are more than 85,000 Chinese characters! However, research (Huang 1994 and Da 2004) shows that the most frequently used 1200 Chinese Characters account for about 90% of the characters occurring in the real world. Therefore, this is about the number of characters needed for a learner to reach intermediate level, which is also the level to be able to communicate effectively, or in other words, to be able to carry on a daily conversation in Chinese for average Chinese learners or to be able to do business in Chinese for business people.</p>

<p>Source:<a href="http://www.chinesehulu.com/for-new-arrival/1200-most-frequently-used-chinese-characters-list-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.chinesehulu.com/for-new-arrival/1200-most-frequently-used-chinese-characters-list-1</a></p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-05-13T21:16:24.310Z
2014-05-13T21:16:24.310Z
ChineseHulu.com
<p><strong>EDIT</strong>:</p>

<p>My answer to the first question is that the Official list of 2,000 characters contained in the book are what I would recommend.</p>

<p>I am not qualified to answer regarding fluency and accept the answer of others.</p>

<p>If you're interested in a good offline reference that you can study at length, I'd recommend <a href="http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0804832064" rel="nofollow noreferrer">McNaughton and Li's (1999)  Reading &amp; Writing Chinese (Revised Edition)</a>. The traditional version is just fine as it shows both Traditional and where needed Simplified versions of the characters: </p>

<p>Sample of text:
<img src="https://i.sstatic.net/9LOvO.jpg" alt="ReadingandWritingChineseSample"></p>

<p>Other properties of this text (ignore cantonese handwritten notes):</p>

<ul>
<li>Includes 1020 Character (Student List)</li>
<li>2000 Characters on the Official List</li>
<li>Sample usage of characters</li>
<li>Explanation of the character</li>
<li>Stroke order diagram</li>
<li>Radical Information</li>
<li>Seems some cheap used copies available on Amazon</li>
</ul>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-05-26T20:28:27.510Z
2014-08-12T12:37:01.073Z
2014-08-12T12:37:01.073Z
Tommie C.
<p>You would probably need to learn 500 for very basic communication, but to be able to talk to someone, 2000 is ok.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-05-26T13:44:17.860Z
Not entirely sure that learning to read/write will help my verbal skills
Cocowalla
CC BY-SA 4.0
2014-05-26T13:34:36.570Z
2020-06-08T21:51:00.690Z
2020-06-08T21:51:00.690Z
tommyip
<p>I am a native Chinese teacher from iChineseLearning. Hope my answer will help you. If you are a beginner, you need to learn it from learn characters. In addition, the grammar is the most vital part of Chinese learning, if you want to speak fluency. The intermediate Chinese grammar is for those who have mastered at least 600 Chinese words and related grammar knowledge. You will enhance on the grammar knowledge and explore the new. After this, you will be able to communicate in Chinese on topics of life, study and work in a relatively fluent manner. So learn Chinese grammar <a href="http://www.chinese-grammar.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Chinese-Grammar</a> is necessary. </p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2015-07-16T08:34:43.730Z
2020-06-08T21:51:25.960Z
2020-06-08T21:51:25.960Z
alex
<p>Counting the characters doesn't make sense at all. It doesn't really say much about your proficiency.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-03-30T12:47:45.923Z
This doesn't answer the question at all. Should be a comment.
JBentley
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-01-01T02:24:03.283Z
2014-01-01T02:24:03.283Z
Kovács Imre
<p>Depending on how 'in touch' with the language (in terms of understanding grammatical constructions and context clues) you may be considered fairly fluent with 80% or so character recognition</p>

<p>Think about your vocabulary in English.  If you pick up a book with many words you don't know, you may still be able to comprehend it based on the context of the words that you might not know.  Same applies for Chinese.</p>

<p>If you are interested in numbers and facts, here are the results of some studies:</p>

<p>Cumulative Character Frequency for the Top N Characters based on two studies (Huang 1994 and Da 2004)</p>

<p>Top 250 characters: 64.4% / 57.1%</p>

<p>Top 500 characters: 79.2 / 72.1%</p>

<p>Top 1000 characters: 91.1 / 86.2%</p>

<p>Top 1500 characters: 95.7 / 92.4%</p>

<p>Top 2000 characters: 97.9 / 95.6%</p>

<p>Top 3000 characters: 99.4 / 98.3%</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>The results from the above studies have been used to generate two different sets of flashcards.</p>

<p>The Top 1000 Traditional Characters is based on C .H. Tsai's combined 1993–1994 data.
The Top 1000 Simplified Characters 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.</p>

<p>Source: <a href="http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/topchars.php">http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/topchars.php</a></p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-13T22:47:49.997Z
2013-12-24T04:31:04.917Z
2013-12-24T04:31:04.917Z
arcyqwerty
<p>How many Chinese characters would I generally need to learn to be able to handle most text in typical every day circumstances?</p>

<p>How many would be required to be considered fluent?</p>

<p>Are there any good resources for learning the most commonly used characters?</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-05-27T01:10:09.570Z
I have checked a frequency list and added characters from it now and then (mostly for fun, I don't think this is the best way of learning new characters). I'm now at 5400 and i think I stopped learning really useful characters at around 4000. After that, there are many place names, surnames and characters that only appear in one or two words that are themselves not very common. 3500-4000 will enable you to read most normal texts in modern Chinese. (Note: I'm referring to traditional characters here, not sure exactly how simplified would differ.)
Olle Linge
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-09-04T14:30:47.273Z
I performed an analysis of my own here, with Google's ngram data: http://puroh.it/how-many-chinese-characters-and-words-are-in-use/
rxmnnxfpvg
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-09-04T15:04:12.277Z
@ash Nice, I wasn't aware of that Google data, and great analysis by yourself!
Cocowalla
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-09-26T16:01:35.627Z
One reason not to overemphasize frequency is that you cannot become fluent by recognizing individual characters.  You need comfort with actual usage on signs and in sentences.  You need to read a lot.  Start with graded readers of course but get to actual Chinese written matter.
Colin McLarty
CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-07-08T12:43:37.993Z
did anybody mention how many characters Chinese school children learn？ ＂教学汉字规范手册":２５００个常用汉字（分析）and １０００ 个次常用汉字（分析）
user6065
<characters><writing><reading>
How many characters do I need to learn?
# How many characters do I need to learn?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2011-12-13)

How many Chinese characters would I generally need to learn to be able to handle most text in typical every day circumstances?

How many would be required to be considered fluent?

Are there any good resources for learning the most commonly used characters?

**Tags:** characters, writing, reading
> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: I have checked a frequency list and added characters from it now and then (mostly for fun, I don't think this is the best way of learning new characters). I'm now at 5400 and i think I stopped learning really useful characters at around 4000. After that, there are many place names, surnames and characters that only appear in one or two words that are themselves not very common. 3500-4000 will enable you to read most normal texts in modern Chinese. (Note: I'm referring to traditional characters here, not sure exactly how simplified would differ.)  
> **username_2**: I performed an analysis of my own here, with Google's ngram data: http://puroh.it/how-many-chinese-characters-and-words-are-in-use/  
> **username_0**: @ash Nice, I wasn't aware of that Google data, and great analysis by yourself!  
> **username_3**: One reason not to overemphasize frequency is that you cannot become fluent by recognizing individual characters.  You need comfort with actual usage on signs and in sentences.  You need to read a lot.  Start with graded readers of course but get to actual Chinese written matter.  
> **username_4**: did anybody mention how many characters Chinese school children learn？ ＂教学汉字规范手册":２５００个常用汉字（分析）and １０００ 个次常用汉字（分析）  

---

## 9 answers

### Answer by username_17 on 2011-12-13. Score: 39 | Accepted answer

Depending on how 'in touch' with the language (in terms of understanding grammatical constructions and context clues) you may be considered fairly fluent with 80% or so character recognition

Think about your vocabulary in English. If you pick up a book with many words you don't know, you may still be able to comprehend it based on the context of the words that you might not know. Same applies for Chinese.

If you are interested in numbers and facts, here are the results of some studies:

Cumulative Character Frequency for the Top N Characters based on two studies (Huang 1994 and Da 2004)

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 Top 1000 Traditional Characters is based on C .H. Tsai's combined 1993–1994 data.
The Top 1000 Simplified Characters 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.

Source: <http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/topchars.php>


---

### Answer by username_5 on 2011-12-14. Score: 11

I had heard various numbers over the years, so I guessed at 4000 and generated computer flashcards for reading and writing all the Chinese vocabulary I'll need for the foreseeable future. There are currently 32614 cards with 4166 characters and 18385 words. They are divided into separate files, each with about 100 cards in it. You can download the flashcards for the first 700 characters from [my Google Code page](http://code.google.com/p/donkirkby/wiki/ChineseVocabulary). I'll publish the remaining characters after I'm happy with the current set.

The cards cover English definition, simplified character, traditional character, and pinyin pronunciation of each character, as well as the most common words using those characters.

The software is [Mnemosyne](http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/), which uses the spaced repetition technique to schedule when you review the cards you already know. It's not fast, but it seems to stick a lot better than manually reviewing vocabulary lists.

Here's a screenshot:

![Mnemosyne screenshot](https://i.sstatic.net/4SH02.png)

In a couple of more recent projects, I tried to build some tools to help with reading practice. I sieved through Chinese text looking for sentences that use only the characters I know. My first attempt was with [Twitter updates](http://code.google.com/p/donkirkby/wiki/ChineseTweets), but it was kind of a slow process to find and translate them. More recently, I found a huge collection of translated sentences on [Tatoeba](http://tatoeba.org). I've collected all the sentences that used the 500 most common traditional characters and posted them on [my Google Code page](http://donkirkby.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/frequency-flashcards/sentence-rank/output/sentences.html). They're sorted with the most common characters at the start of the page.

> **Comments:**
> **username_7**: Oh my! Seems like a great tool, thanks for sharing!  
> **username_6**: Also http://www.skritter.com/  
> **username_8**: Also Inkstone: https://www.skishore.me/inkstone/  

---

### Answer by username_9 on 2015-07-08. Score: 6

If you want to have a quantitative answer you can look at the commulative character frequencies of larger Chinese text corpora. If compiled a list of the most common Chinese characters [here](http://git.io/hanzifreq) (using [this code](https://github.com/czielinski/hanzifreq)).

There you can see that if you know the 100 most common characters, you can recognize one third of the characters on Wikipedia. If you know the most common 500 characters, you can read two thirds, with 1000 characters 83% and with 2000 characters 94%.

These numbers differ of course depending on the text corpus and the numbers quoted here are valid for the Chinese Wikipedia.


---

### Answer by username_10 on 2011-12-13. Score: 5

Based on my experience, about 2000 characters will give you command of most texts. Perhaps 4,000 will make you fluent. For the first 2,000, I recommend, [Chinese Characters: Learn & Remember 2,178 Characters and Their Meanings](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0982232403).


---

### Answer by username_11 on 2014-05-13. Score: 4

According to Zhonghua Zihai, the largest Chinese character dictionary, there are more than 85,000 Chinese characters! However, research (Huang 1994 and Da 2004) shows that the most frequently used 1200 Chinese Characters account for about 90% of the characters occurring in the real world. Therefore, this is about the number of characters needed for a learner to reach intermediate level, which is also the level to be able to communicate effectively, or in other words, to be able to carry on a daily conversation in Chinese for average Chinese learners or to be able to do business in Chinese for business people.

Source:<http://www.chinesehulu.com/for-new-arrival/1200-most-frequently-used-chinese-characters-list-1>


---

### Answer by username_12 on 2014-05-26. Score: 2

**EDIT**:

My answer to the first question is that the Official list of 2,000 characters contained in the book are what I would recommend.

I am not qualified to answer regarding fluency and accept the answer of others.

If you're interested in a good offline reference that you can study at length, I'd recommend [McNaughton and Li's (1999) Reading & Writing Chinese (Revised Edition)](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0804832064). The traditional version is just fine as it shows both Traditional and where needed Simplified versions of the characters:

Sample of text:
![ReadingandWritingChineseSample](https://i.sstatic.net/9LOvO.jpg)

Other properties of this text (ignore cantonese handwritten notes):

* Includes 1020 Character (Student List)
* 2000 Characters on the Official List
* Sample usage of characters
* Explanation of the character
* Stroke order diagram
* Radical Information
* Seems some cheap used copies available on Amazon


---

### Answer by username_13 on 2014-05-26. Score: 0

You would probably need to learn 500 for very basic communication, but to be able to talk to someone, 2000 is ok.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Not entirely sure that learning to read/write will help my verbal skills  

---

### Answer by username_14 on 2015-07-16. Score: 0

I am a native Chinese teacher from iChineseLearning. Hope my answer will help you. If you are a beginner, you need to learn it from learn characters. In addition, the grammar is the most vital part of Chinese learning, if you want to speak fluency. The intermediate Chinese grammar is for those who have mastered at least 600 Chinese words and related grammar knowledge. You will enhance on the grammar knowledge and explore the new. After this, you will be able to communicate in Chinese on topics of life, study and work in a relatively fluent manner. So learn Chinese grammar [Chinese-Grammar](http://www.chinese-grammar.com/) is necessary.


---

### Answer by username_15 on 2014-01-01. Score: -1

Counting the characters doesn't make sense at all. It doesn't really say much about your proficiency.

> **Comments:**
> **username_16**: This doesn't answer the question at all. Should be a comment.  

---

