However, the answer to “How many Chinese characters are there?” is very<\/em> different from the answer to “How many Chinese characters do I need to know?”<\/p>\n Let me walk you through the number of Chinese characters, how many you actually need to know, how to learn them and why you should.<\/p>\n [fluentu-toc] A lot, as you now know!<\/p>\n But, while there are upwards of 80,000 Chinese characters in total, you only need to know around 2,000 Chinese characters to be literate.<\/p>\n By 3,500 characters, you’ll recognize nearly 99.5% of modern Chinese writing. Even college-educated Chinese people only know around 8,000 characters.<\/p>\n To really understand the Chinese writing system and why these numbers are so different, however, we’ll need to take a closer look at what exactly is being counted and how the whole system works.<\/p>\n Chinese characters have actually evolved over thousands of years.\u00a0The first iterations\u00a0date all the way back to the Shang Dynasty, which lasted from 1600 to 1046 BC.<\/p>\n Back then, Chinese characters were oracle bone inscriptions<\/strong>\u00a0or ancestral pictograms carved onto tortoise shells and animal bones.<\/p>\n These inscriptions were followed by symbols carved into bronze.\u00a0Bronze inscriptions<\/strong> appeared at the end of the Shang Dynasty and were prevalent during the Zhou Dynasty or “Bronze Age,” which was from 1046 to 771 BC.<\/p>\n The bone and bronze inscriptions were quite similar, but the bronze characters were more structured and had thicker lines.<\/p>\n During the Warring States Period from 475 to 221 BC, there was no standard Chinese script. Different parts of the empire had their own scripts, but all that changed once Emperor Qin Shi Huang united China.<\/p>\n The standard written language in the Qin Dynasty (221 to 206 BC) used small seal characters<\/strong>. These had proportional brush strokes and a sort of diamond shape.\u00a0They’re also the foundation of the contemporary writing system.<\/p>\n The Han Dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD) ushered in the official script<\/strong>. This was where the written language looked less like pictograms and more like characters as we know them, with curved and broken strokes.<\/p>\n At the end of the Han Dynasty, the official script transitioned into the regular script<\/strong>, but it only became popular during the Northern and Southern Dynasties from 420 to 589 AD.<\/p>\n During this era, the regular script continuously underwent stylistic changes. It reached its final form in the Tang Dynasty, which spanned from 618 to 907 AD, and it’s what we’ve come to recognize as traditional Chinese<\/strong>.<\/p>\n It wasn’t until 1954 that the government simplified the traditional characters<\/strong> for printing use. This was to increase literacy throughout China by lessening the number of brush strokes needed to write many common characters.<\/p>\n Traditional characters make up the large majority of all Chinese characters.<\/p>\n The government began simplifying characters in the 1950s in order to improve literacy rates. By 1986, over 2,000 characters had been simplified.<\/p>\n According to the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters<\/a>, there are currently 8,105 simplified characters<\/strong>, although that number includes common characters that remain the same in both forms.<\/p>\n You can read more about the difference between the forms in this post about simplified and traditional Chinese<\/a>. Here is a video that explains the differences between traditional and simplified characters:<\/p>\n If you’re not sure whether to learn the traditional or simplified form of the language, consider your purpose for learning Mandarin.<\/p>\n Traditional Chinese is preferred in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, so if you plan on traveling or moving to one of those places, you’re better off studying the traditional form.<\/p>\n If you’re headed to China, Singapore or Malaysia, simplified Chinese is the way to go. And, in general, there are slightly more learning resources available for simplified characters.<\/p>\n If you’re interested in learning to read<\/a> and write Chinese characters, you may be wondering… How?<\/p>\n The truth is that there is no Chinese alphabet<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Some people refer to the pinyin system<\/a> as the Chinese alphabet, but this is inaccurate. Pinyin uses the Latin alphabet to describe the pronunciation of Chinese characters, but it’s not actually used for creating words.<\/p>\n It’s a little confusing, and it doesn’t help that there are 26 letters in both the English alphabet and the pinyin system.<\/p>\n Just know that, unlike Western languages, Chinese doesn’t rely on letters (pinyin or otherwise) to formulate characters and words.<\/p>\n Even if you learn Chinese in Taiwan, which doesn’t use the pinyin system, there is no alphabet. Instead of (or in addition to) pinyin, you will learn the Zhuyin phonetic symbols<\/a>, but that’s still all they are\u2014a phonetic pronunciation guide, and not the basis of words or characters.<\/p>\n Instead of an alphabet, Chinese characters are composed of building blocks known as radicals and components<\/a>.<\/p>\n Radicals index and categorize characters.<\/strong> Basically, they’re like the first letter of English words; they’re what we use to look them up in a dictionary. While you can look up words online using pinyin, it’s still pretty handy learning this classification for Chinese characters.<\/p>\n Check out this video to learn more about how radicals work:<\/p>\n For the most part, characters contain one main radical, which you can usually find either on the left or top of the character. There are 214 radicals in total.<\/p>\n An example is \u531a (f\u0101ng)<\/em> which means “box,” and it’s included in characters like \u533a (q\u016b)<\/em> meaning “area” and \u5320 (ji\u00e0ng)<\/em> meaning “craftsman.”<\/p>\n The other important thing to know is the components. There are two types:<\/p>\n Radicals can also act as phonetic or semantic components. They may even be referred to as “phonetic radicals” and “semantic radicals.”<\/p>\n Let’s take a look at the character \u5988<\/strong> (m\u0101)<\/em> for “mother.” It’s composed of two parts:<\/p>\n As you can see, \u5973 would be the semantic component or semantic radical that indicates the character refers to a female, while \u9a6c would be the phonetic component that shares the same pinyin as \u5988, just with a different tone.<\/p>\n Again, though radicals and components help you understand Chinese characters, they’re not the same thing as an alphabet. Many of the 214 radicals are also common words on their own.<\/p>\n The final distinction to be aware of is the difference between Chinese characters and Chinese words.<\/p>\n As we just mentioned, some Chinese characters can represent standalone words<\/strong>. They can also represent components for creating other words, ideas and concepts. \u5973 and \u9a6c from above are perfect examples of characters that are standalone words, as well as components for building other characters.<\/p>\n That means the combinations of characters like those form all kinds of words, which is great news for Chinese learners.<\/p>\n Basically, a handful of Chinese characters can be combined and reorganized to express a wide variety of ideas<\/strong>\u2014you don’t need to learn a brand new Chinese character for every new object or action that you encounter.<\/p>\n For example, check out these characters that are each equivalent to a single English word:<\/p>\n Now let’s do a quick exercise. Using the nine characters in the list above, how would you say the following words?<\/p>\n Here are the answers:<\/p>\n So, although the total number of Chinese characters is very large\u2014and even if the number of characters you personally need to learn to get to a basic level seems large\u2014remember that there are many cases in which you’ll be ahead of the game simply by knowing the most basic characters there are.<\/p>\n You can be fluent in English even if you don’t come close to knowing all 1,00,000 estimated words, or even the 470,000 included in the Merriam-Webster dictionary<\/a>.<\/p>\n Chinese isn’t any different in this respect.<\/p>\n As you just learned, characters are both standalone words and components of other words and ideas. So, really, there are two questions that need an answer here:<\/p>\n Well, the average person only needs to know around 2,000 Chinese characters to be fluent<\/strong>. Those characters represent a basic education level that can help you make it in day-to-day life.<\/p>\n Because Chinese fluency is generally measured by character count, it’s assumed that you’d be able to put those characters into words the way we did with the exercise above. However, that means word count, though a bit harder to quantify, is where your Chinese fluency goals really come into play.\u00a0<\/p>\n To understand how your vocabulary knowledge impacts your fluency level, I recommend that you follow the standards set by the HSK Chinese proficiency test<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n The HSK 2.0 exam is still being administered in many locations. Here are the requirements for that version of the test:<\/p>\n\n
\n<\/p>\nHow Many Chinese Characters Are There?<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fluentu.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Chinese-characters.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe History of Chinese Characters<\/h3>\n
Traditional Chinese vs. Simplified Chinese<\/h3>\n
Is There a Chinese Alphabet?<\/h3>\n
Chinese Radicals and Components<\/h3>\n
\n
\n
Chinese Characters vs. Chinese Words<\/h3>\n
\n
\n
\n
How Many Chinese Characters Do You Need to Know?<\/h2>\n
\n