How Many Chinese Characters Do I Need To Learn_ - Learn Chinese Characters with Yoyo Chinese.

Welcome back. In this lesson, we'll answer two important questions. First, is a character a word? And second, how many characters should you plan to learn? The short answer to the first question is sometimes. Sometimes a character is a word, but often it's not. Let me explain. As you know by now, some Chinese words are just one syllable, like the words rén, person, shuǐ, water, dà, big, shū, book. Each of those single syllable words is represented by just one character. So in those cases, the character is a word. In ancient Chinese, nearly all words were single syllable, so they were represented by just one character like that. But in modern Chinese, many words are two or more syllables, such as míng bái, understand, péng yǒu, friend, and zì xíng chē, bicycle. In those cases, there's one character for each syllable, and those two or more characters combined form one word. So you can think of it like this. The character is a basic unit. It always represents one syllable. Sometimes one syllable or unit is a word on its own, but sometimes two or more syllables or units must be combined to make a word. Now remember how I said in the last lesson that characters contain components, which are like building blocks? I told you the great news that the more you learn, the easier it gets to put them together to form new characters. Well, here's another piece of good news for you. Chinese words also act like building blocks. So the principle of the more you learn, the easier it gets also applies here. Now let's take a look at this word, rén kǒu, population. It contains two characters, rén, person, and kǒu, mouth. If you take the time to learn these two characters, rén and kǒu, as well as another two characters, cái, that means talent, and qì, that means heir, you can then put these four characters together to form six different words. So you see, since Chinese words are often formed by characters that are found in lots of other words, when you learn just a few characters, you get exponential growth of knowledge of Chinese words, and it just keeps compounding. For this reason, when I teach you a new character, I'm going to take the time to show you other words that it's found in. I want you to get a good understanding of different ways that one character is used in combination with other characters, so that you'll be prepared to recognize it in various compound words. In this case, ensuring quality of study and focusing on words definitely makes more sense than going for quantity of characters. Speaking of quantity of characters, the second question that I want to discuss here is, how many characters should I plan to learn? If you have ever googled this question, you know that there are lots of ideas out there about how many characters you need to know. The general consensus is that you need three thousand to read a newspaper. Some say you need less, some say you need more. Here's what I say, take a deep breath and relax. It might be true that you need to know three thousand characters if you plan to read The Economist in Chinese, but if you want to be able to communicate with Chinese friends by email or text message and to feel comfortable with some basic Chinese street signs, then you can probably do that with less than five hundred characters under your belt. Take a look at this chart. By knowing just one hundred of the most frequently used characters, you can understand about 42% of written Chinese. And by knowing just two hundred of the most frequently used characters, you can understand more than half of any given Chinese text. So the point here is that just a little bit of work goes a very long way. That's why I'm going to take advantage of that building block nature of Chinese words and just focus on teaching you those most commonly used characters. Well, I'll talk more about it next time. Alright, see you next time, zài jiàn. Click here to watch the next introductory lesson. You'll learn exactly how Chinese characters are formed and why they look the way they do. Click here to start learning characters today at YoYo Chinese. Click here to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Alright, thank you so much, zài jiàn.