'5 How many characters must one learn?

Before answering this question, the would-be learner needs to be aware of the false analogy that is constantly being made between the Chinese characters and the letters of the English alphabet. For example, Bodmer in The Loom of Language writes of learning Chinese:

ASo much thankless toil tempts us to wonder why the Chinese do not discard their archaic script in favour of our own more handy and thrifty alphabet@,

while Sturtevant in An Introduction to Linguistic Science agrees by affirming that:

AIt is safe to say that the Chinese, in spite of their high intelligence, must adopt an alphabet before they can rival the Europeans and Americans in science, engineering and scholarship in general.@

Neither they or the many writers who copy their opinions seem to be aware that each character is made up of from a limited number of basic strokes written in a definite order, just as each English word is made up from a limited number of letters which must be written in an definite order. Nor is it true, as is often implied, that English-speakers need to know only the 26 letters of the alphabet to be able to read. Otherwise, how many of our pre-schoolers must we count as being literate, and why is it that, according to a recent newspaper report (The Press: 19th October, 1997) one-quarter of NZ children leave school without being able to read and write. Surveys in other English-speaking countries have given similar results.

Having spread a false comparison between the letters of the alphabet and the Chinese characters or basic words, some European writers then confuse the issue even more by giving highly exaggerated estimates of the number of characters that a fluent reader of Chinese needs to know. Figures given range from 400 Abasic words@ in Bodmer, to 140,000 in a photo caption of A Day in the Life of China. Although this last estimate is nowhere near the truth, it is at least comparable to the 120,000 entries in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, but it is as nothing compared to the number of words listed in the twenty volumes of the Oxford Dictionary itself. Of course, no one in their right minds would think it was necessary for learners of English to know every word in the English dictionary before they would be able to read. Yet the underlying assumption made by many Ascholars@ is that this is not the case with Chinese. S.H. Muller even asserts in The World=s Living Languages that:

AIt is self-evident that there are few men that can accomplish the formidable task of memorising all the characters.@

In Passport to China, after pointing out that:

Athe Chinese written language by contrast, is a structure with more than 50,000 different characters or ideographs which have to be memorised @

Stephen Keeler then concludes that:

ADaunting feats of memory are required to master such a language.@

These views are passed on in the Oxford Children' s Encyclopaedia which tells its young readers that:

AA boy who wanted to join the scholar gentry had to study for years to read and write 40,000 characters of Chinese script.@

Other writers, without asserting quite as categorically that every character had to be memorised in order to be able to read, nevertheless assume this to be the case. Thus Tom McArthur, in the Oxford Companion to the English Language, for instance, writes:

AThe Chinese writing system consists of some 40,000 characters or ideograms, and is largely independent of sound much as the numbers 1,2,3,4,5 etc. are language independent@,

while The World Book Encyclopaedia also gives a similar figure, saying that:

AWritten Chinese consists of about 50,000 characters@.

On the other hand, John P. Hughes, a linguistics expert, informs us in The Science of Language: an Introduction to Linguistics that:

Ait is estimated that 70,000 to 125,000 (Chinese) characters exist.@

And as if that were not large enough, the Doubleday collection of photos in A day in the Life of China breaks the record, inflating the figure to 140,000. It places a caption under one of its photos which reads:

AAt a rural elementary school in the northern town of Yulin, first graders are introduced to some of the 140,000 characters that make up the Chinese lexicon.@

In the face of so much misinformation, what are would-be learners of Chinese to believe? What in fact is a reliable estimate of the actual number of characters in existence, and how many of these do fluent readers need to have at their fingertips? One would have thought that it would be a simple matter to estimate the number merely by consulting a standard Chinese dictionary.

The first formal dictionary named Shuowen jiezi (˵ ÎÄ ½â ×Ö ), compiled by Xu Shen (Ðí É÷ ) during the Eastern Han Dynasty about 100 AD, contains 9,353 characters. The Zì Lín ( ×Ö ÁÖ) , compiled in 400 AD, contains 12,824 characters. By the year 1008 AD, 26,000 characters were listed in the Guang Yùn (¹ã ÔÏ) , and a few years later, that figure reached 31,000 in the Lei Pian( Àà ƪ ). The famous Kangx Zìdian (¿µ Îõ ×Ö µä), authorised by the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing dynasty in 1716, gathered together 47,035 characters. Today, the most recent Chinese dictionary, the Hànyß Dà Zìdian (ºº Óï ´ó ×Ö µä), the largest ever compiled, has amassed an even larger number of 56,000 characters.

But just as no learner of English needs to know every word in the Oxford Dictionary or even in the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, so there is no need for foreign learners of Chinese to know every word in the dictionaries mentioned so far. Reference dictionaries must list every character, ancient and modern, regardless of whether they are in current use or not.

The vast majority of characters in the standard reference dictionaries are either obsolete or are alternative or variant forms, but even then, the total is less than 60,000, so it is a mystery where writers in English got their wildly different estimates raging up to hundreds of thousands from.

Most working dictionaries, today, contain between 6000 to 10,000 characters, while the two major computer codes for Chinese contain 8000 to 13,000. But it is not necessary to know every one of these characters either to be able to read. In fact, the World Book Encyclopaedia after telling its readers that the Chinese writing system consists of 50,000 characters, adds that:

AA person who knows about 500 of the most frequently used characters can read a Chinese newspaper or modern novel.@

We have already seen that the total number of existing characters is approximately 60,000, but that not all of them carry the same weight, the vast majority of them being either Adead@ or obsolete forms or alternative variant forms. For example, the same simple word _^ (huí = to return) can be written in as many as four different characters, just as some English words can be spelt in different ways.

It is estimated that at least 20,000 of the 47,000 characters listed in the Kangxi Zidian are alternative forms of the standard characters, and that some are Adead@ characters, which appeared in writing once, never to be used again, and so have to be listed, and that a further 15,000 or so are either Aobsolete@ or no longer in current use, appearing only in ancient classical works. In the Kangxi Zidian, there are nearly 500 characters with the semantic Ahorse@ radical, but in Dictionary of Modern Chinese Words (Xiandai Hanyu Cidian: ÏÖ ´ú ºº Óï ´Ê µä ), the most widely used contemporary dictionary, fewer than 80 such characters can be found. Thus, the bulk of the characters in the Kangxi Zidian are no longer used today. Its contemporary equivalent, the Cí Hai ( ´Ç º£or Sea of Words) contains only 14,872 characters, a far cry from the huge numbers given in so many English works.

But there is no need to memorise all of these 14,872 characters either. For even amongst these, a number of variant or obsolete characters can still be found, while many more are technical terms, which only specialists in the field would need to have readily at their disposal. Most English-speakers are not familiar either with the English technical terms and jargon of specialist fields in which they have little or no interest. 14,000 characters still seems far too many characters for anyone to memorise.

In fact, learners need to memorise only the words that are actually in general use. Lao She (ÀÏ Éá), in his famous novel Luotuo Xiangzi (Âæ ÍÕ Ïé ×Óor Rickshaw Boy), over 100,000 characters in length, used only 2413 different characters. Mao Zedong in the his five volumes of his Selected Works, written in 900,000 characters, uses just over 3,000 different characters. These two examples should give learners a clearer idea as to how many characters are actually needed for reading and writing, and so put their learning into perspective.

Moreover, according to A Frequency Table of Chinese Characters published by the Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Language, the first 28 most frequently used characters cover 20 percent of the total sample material of 21,629,376 characters. From the same table, we see that the first 163 characters will give a coverage of 50 percent of the reading material sampled. It is of course not enough to be able to read only half of what you want to read, but a knowledge of the first 2400 characters will enable learners to recognise 99 percent of the characters that they will confront in general reading. The table also shows that a little over 3,800 characters brings the coverage to 99.9 percent. About 3,000 or so characters or basic words should thus be sufficient for general reading and writing purposes, and not the hundreds of thousands that are bandied about so readily in much of the current literature on the Chinese language.

'6 Easy aspects of learning Chinese

Although a great deal has been written on the alleged difficulties of learning Chinese, very little is usually said about the compensating advantages that make Chinese so much easier to learn than is the case with many European languages, such as its relatively simple phonetic and grammatical structures.

In order to sing more or less in tune, one has to learn eight different pitches for one octave of the major scale, and another eight for each of the minor scales, as well as the twelve for the chromatic scale. It is hard to understand why writers have made such a fuss of having to learn the four basic intonations of standard Chinese.

But even if it is admittedly not easy at first for an English-speaker to associate different intonations of a Chinese phrase with different meanings, something which he does naturally in English, he has an advantage which a Chinese-speaker learning English does not have. That is, that all Chinese syllables begin with a single initial sound. There are no consonant clusters to learn to pronounce, such as Asp@, Ask@, Ast@, Astr@, Aspr@, Asch@, Aschr@. Moreover, every syllable ends in either a vowel, an An@ or an Ang@, no other endings being possible.

In comparison with most European languages, Chinese grammar is extremely simple, as most English-speakers who made the effort to learn the language have found to their great surprise. The reason for this is because Chinese words are invariable, that is, they do not have inflexional endings.

Thus English-speakers learning Chinese do not have to remember whether nouns are masculine, feminine or neuter, as they do when learning French, German, Russian, Latin or Greek, to mention only languages commonly taught in New Zealand schools. Nor do they have to learn how to form plurals. Chinese nouns form their plural like the English words Adeer@, Asheep@, Afish@, that is, by remaining unchanged.

Words do not alter according to case in Chinese. English-speakers therefore do not have to learn Chinese distinctions between AI@ and Ame@, Ahe@ and Ahim@, Ashe@ and Aher@, Athey@ and Athem@ as Chinese-speakers have to do when learning English. For Chinese-speakers and English-speakers alike, learning the declensions in German, Russian, Latin or Greek is a formidable task, because there are so many different declensions, and since nouns and adjectives often decline differently even when used together.

Not only are there no declensions in Chinese, there are no conjugations either. Chinese-speakers studying English have to learn when to use Abe@, Aam@, Aart@, Ais@, Awas@, Awere@, Abeen@, Abeing@, as well as Ago@, Agoest@, Agoes@, Agoeth@, Agoing@, Agone@, Awent@, as well as the changes in many other verbs, whereas English-speakers learning Chinese learn only one invariable form for the verb Ato be@, and one for the verb Ato go@. Thus there are none of the complications of verb conjugations with their different tenses, aspects, moods, etc, and there is no need to consult handbooks listing long lists of irregular verbs. Nor are there conjugations of adjectives as occurs in Japanese.

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This page last revised: 27th December, 2000