There are over 80,000 Chinese characters, but most of them
are seldom used today. So how many Chinese characters do you
need to know? For basic reading and writing of modern
Chinese, you only need a few thousands. Here are the
coverage rates of the most frequently used Chinese
characters:
Most frequently used 1,000 characters: ~90%
(Coverage rate)
Most frequently used 2,500 characters: 98.0%
(Coverage rate)
Most frequently used 3,500 characters: 99.5%
(Coverage rate)
For an English word, the Chinese translation (or the
Chinese 'word') often consists of two or more Chinese
characters. You should use them together and read them from
left to right. If you want to arrange them vertically, the
one on the leftmost should go to the top. See an example for
the word 'English' below:
As you can see, there are two Chinese characters for
English (the language), which are ying1 yu3 in Pinyin.
Pinyin is the international standard romanization scheme for
Chinese characters, which is useful for learning the
phonetics of Mandarin. There are four tones in Pinyin and we
use the numbers here, i.e., 1, 2, 3, and 4, to depict the
four tones. If you want to learn Mandarin (or Pu3 Tong1
Hua4), you have to master the four tones of the language.
However, one pinyin usually represents many Chinese
characters. For example, han4 can depict the Chinese
characters for sweet, drought, brave, Chinese, etc. Thus you
have to learn the Chinese characters to master the language.
Chinese is not alphabetic so the writing is not related
to its phonetics. We don't translate the Western alphabet
since the letters have no meaning, and we do use the letters
in writings, especially in scientific writings.
There are many styles of Chinese writing. Some of the
styles are more ancient than others. In general, there are
large differences among the styles, even though some of the
styles are quite close. Different styles of Chinese
characters are naturally used according to the purposes of
the writing, such as Xiaozhuan mainly used for seal carving
now. Style of Chinese writing is similar to English font in
sense. Besides the different styles, there are also two forms
of Chinese characters, the simplified and the traditional.
The simplified is the standard writing form employed in the
mainland of China and the traditional form is mainly used in
Taiwan and Hong Kong. There are total 2,235 simplified
characters contained in the 'Simplified Character Table'
published in 1964 by the Chinese government, so the majority
of the Chinese characters are the same in the two forms,
though the count of commonly-used Chinese characters is only
about 3,500.
Japanese Kanji are originally from China so most of them
are the same as their corresponding Chinese characters, but
Japanese kanji only contain a small collection of Chinese
characters. There are a lot more Chinese characters not
included in Japanese Kanji. Kanji are used less and less now
in Japan. You don't see a lot of Kanji in a modern Japanese
book anymore.
