I am a Peace Corps volunteer in China studying with the New Practical Chinese Reader. I know about 500 characters and 300 words.

I'd like to know what the general consensus is for how many words & characters I have to learn before I can make my way through a newspaper. I'm sure the numbers vary, so I'd be interested to hear all of your opinions. Thanks!

Alex

My opinion, based on experience: at least 3500.

I'm curious why people always use the New Practical Reader for learning Chinese

Depends on how fluent you like to be and what words/characters you have learned. Already with some 1000 frequent characters you can read a lot but have to use a dictionary equally often. With 2000 you can be down to only have to use the dictionary for a couple of words per article. With 3000 you will only need it now and then depending on what sort of article you read. My Chinese wife also need to look up words from time to time when she read some special articles and she knows some 8-10000 characters give or take. If you stick with gossip articles you probably need less words/characters than if you read political or financial articles with lots of special expressions. With 500 (high frequency) characters I could read most of my daughters bed time stories in Chinese. The ones i could not read i usually could just make up some alternative story for;-)

Bohan,

All 6 books of the NPCR series are in the Peace Corp's office library for volunteers' free use. This includes the textbook, textbook CDs, workbook, and workbook CDs. This is a pretty compelling reason for me to use the series.

A flaw in the series are the grammar explanations. It's pretty obvious they were written by Chinese: that is to say extremely technical and difficult to understand. I will be getting a different grammar book to supplement.

What textbooks do you use to study?

Alex

@atd
I'm at 750 characters and whilst its fun to notice familiar characters its not really sufficient. Was asking around and it seems by the time a kid finishes primary school they know about 3,000 and have the ability to express ideas/comcepts. So that's why I'm guessing thats the target

@Alex & @Bohan
I'm using the NCPR too, because when I started classes way back these were the main books used by all the large schools here. Seems this is also a common book in China because its endorsed/written (?) by the BCLU.

I agree with Alex, the grammar is extremely hard to understand. The stories are intresting and the videos are easy to follow. What I like about the set I picked up from Shanghai was it comes with the companion book for practice and there is also the answer book which you can use to mark yourself.

Alex, please do share which book you're using for the grammar because I've about given up trying to follow the NCPR explanations. I mostly now try to parrot back the 'grammar' I've picked up from what I hear people saying. (Of course if you knew how localised the mandarin spoken here is and how much liberty has been taken with the language, you'd also know its not such a great example ;-)

I've requested "Schaum's Outline of Chinese Grammar (Schaum's Outline Series)" from the Peace Corps library. I should get it soon - I've heard good things.

Also, two other books by the same author: "Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar: A Practical Guide" & "Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar Workbook" by Claudia Ross and Jing-heng Sheng Ma.

I've never used any of these books yet, but I've asked around and these are considered the top books by many people.

Alex

Hi Alex,

I actually don't know of any pure Chinese grammar books, and the books I used to study were from Taiwan, so they might not suit your needs.

Where in China are you volunteering?

@Alex - Schaum's Outlines are usually pretty comprehensive and intense, more for reference than something you would try to study straight through.

As for your original question, I think the number of characters isn't really the issue, it's the number of words. It's easy to count characters in Chinese, so that's why you always see estimates in terms of the number of characters, but it's hard to count words as it's not always clear where the words start and stop. And many people who study Chinese have had the experience of looking at a text, recognizing most of the characters, but having no idea what it says because the characters are being used in unfamiliar ways.

Another issue with newspapers specifically is that they will be using translations of foreign names, which are sometimes transliterations (e.g. 哥伦比亚 for Colombia) and sometimes not (e.g. 旧金山 for San Francisco). So if you really want to be able to read newspapers, at some point you should study geography in Chinese. ;)

I believe there was a forum thread with some useful links on this topic a while back - search the forum for "newspaper" if you're interested.

James

I live in Zhangye, Gansu province. It's about 7 hours north of Lanzhou by train. It's a nice place. Small. A little remote. But nice.

You do NOT need to know 3500 characters to be able to read a newspaper. Not even close. All you need is a deep understanding of radicals and a smattering of high frequency characters and you can piece together, at least somewhat, the meaning they are trying to get across. However, if you actually want to understand everything, and not just the gist, then yes: you really do need to know thousands and thousands of characters. I still need to look up new words everytime I read the NYTimes simply because they use esoteric words that few people use.

On a slightly related note, I have never studied French but I can figure out the meaning -- albeit badly -- of mundane consumer products and simple newspapers via context clues and close cognates with other languages I do know.

Personally, according to Skritter, I'm a bit under 1300 characters and a little over 1500 words, though I've probably got another 50 characters and at least a few hundred words that I know but haven't ever put in Skritter. I've been reading a book, 蔡康永的说话知道, which my Chinese teacher gave me for reading practice. I can read it at about a 60% comprehension rate, even with my fairly random smattering of Chinese (I've learned without a teacher by just living here for most of my time in China, including the first two full years, so my learning wasn't particularly methodical). I've and I've been writing down words and characters I don't know yet for a while now (I got to about the 15th chapter then went back to the beginning and started documenting what I didn't understand), and I'd say that even at only 1300ish characters, a majority of my notes are on words that are made up entirely or primarily of characters I know. Granted, she gave it to me as an easy book and I have a harder time with newspapers...

Anyway, all that to say that I agree with the people saying it's more about number of words than number of characters. The thing is, most Chinese people probably wouldn't be able to tell you how many words you needed, and they might even have a hard time counting the words (rather than the characters) in an article if you asked them, so it's become common practice to ask how many characters it takes or how many characters you know just because things are more easily quantifiable that way.

Here's an example: 目前全国经济形势很好. If you try to translate it word-for-word, you get something like "eye before whole country scriptures help shape power very good". If you squint a little, that almost makes sense, and you might think you're on the right track with something like "reading the scriptures of the past helps make the whole country very powerful" but you would be wrong. You need to know that 目前 means "currently", 经济 means "economic", and 形势 means "situation" and then you can figure out the real meaning.

The same thing occurs in English. I was watching The Office the other day and Michael Scott was breaking down the word "fundamental". He started by saying that it was all "mental" and then the other characters mentioned that it had the word "fun" inside as well. This went on for a couple of minutes.

I sporadically substitute for elementary kids so my definition of "reading" isn't as narrow. As long as you have some semblance of comprehension I think you're reading. Also, people dumb down writing when they are trying to convey important messages. It's a lot easier to read headlines than it is to read the actual article.

I don't have experience of Chinese newspapers (way to go yet), but I remember a statistic:

95% of the words in Chinese newspapers are made up of the most common 2000 characters.

Now, that's probably not what you'd call "reading", but if you needed to understand something you could probably put up with looking up 1 in 20 characters.

The combination words are a lot more tricky to measure, but at least if you recognise the character you can look up it and its compounds quite quickly (bypassing the radical index stage).

Rachael.

The main avantage of Chinese (kids or grown ups) is that they already know the language before they learn to read. If a Chinese person reads an article and sees a character that he doesn't know or remember he will very easily be able to make the connection to a word that he already knows, especially because the radicals and the phonetic part of the character will give him valuable hints towards meaningand pronounciation. Compare it to us trying to read a text with all the 'e's (or any other letter) removed. Not too difficult for us, almost impossible for someone with only a partial knowledge of English.

Marc

@marchey fun fact: http://www.spinelessbooks.com/gadsby/

Two other good grammar books:
Basic Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook (1998, 2009)
Intermediate Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook (1998, 2009)
Yip Po-Ching and Don Rimmington published by Routledge.