I am, and will probably always be, a total beginner in Chinese but I still like to look at level grading in Chinese. The OLD HSK system seems to me to be more correct in their levels than the new one. In the old you needed at least

Characters: 800
Words: 1033

for Basic and up to

Characters: 2194
Words: 5257

for high intermediate. In the new that is only

Characters: 349
Words:300

For elementary and up to

Characters: 1074
Words: 1200

for high intermediate.

In China, literacy is measured by the number of characters recognized. For urban dwellers, the current literacy standard is 2000 characters while rural dwellers need know only 1500.

In the new HSK system they state that High intermediate with an mere 1074 characters "can discuss a relatively wide range of topics in Chinese and are capable of communicating with Chinese speakers at a high standard."

Hm, that with an high standard my parents in law will strongly disagree with when it comes to me. So to my question, is there anyone that feel that they actually can communicate a wide range of topics in Chinese at a high standard with only around 1000 characters? Or about what level did you start to feel that you are fluent enough to talk to Chinese about a wide range of topics? Even though I can make my self understood,make some jokes, sing some Chinese songs etc I am so fare away from understanding enough even in basic every day conversations. I guess that I need at least some 3000 more words to start feeling more confident. That is maybe around 1000 more characters.

There always seems to be a realisation that there's more to learn, no matter what stage you're at. All the same, at 3000 characters (and a whole bunch of words), I do feel much more confident. I've also stagnated a bit probably because of this. Need to study more.

1000 characters - wide range of topics, maybe; high standard, not really.

I'm currently at the 2000 character/4000 word area, and feel like from a vocabulary perspective I probably could express a majority of what I want to say at a reasonable (not high) standard. Of course grammar, pronunciation and confidence/flow are damn important in reaching that decent standard, so its not strictly about vocab.

Keep in mind that some view those literacy levels (1500-2000 characters) as deliberately biased downwards in order to improve literacy statistics in China. I've read that around 3000 characters is more appropriate as a basic level of literacy (books, newspapers).

Totally agree that Chinese literacy numbers are lower than they should be. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defines literacy as

"the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society."

With only 1500 characters you will not be able to do this. My daughters Chinese teacher say that she needs to reach at least 5000 characters to be considered to be on high enough level. That is arguable but 1500 is way to low anyway. I can read around 2000+ characters but still have to look up an considerable amount of words/characters even when reading daily newspapers. I do think that around 3000 characters/6000 words will be closer to the level i like to be at. That is still just intermediate level but that will bring my Chinese up to a similar level as my other languages. I will never be fluent in Chinese but i would like to have the ability to enjoy reading Chinese texts. Speaking in Chinese is not really my interest. As a IT nerd I find more happiness in reading Chinese manuals than have to talk to Chinese people;-)

Well here in Taiwan, the standardized Chinese test, TOCFL has 5 levels.

I just successfully passed Level 4, which you need to master 5000 words for.

The highest level, which is really difficult, you have to Master 8000 words for. It also affords knowledge of a decent number of Chengyu.

It is a mistery to me, why the changed the HSK requirements in such a way.

---

So if you want a bigger challenge than the ridiculously dumbed down HSK try the TOCFL!

@fangshi How many characters do those words correspond to?

I recommend this page:
http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/list.php

From the cumulative distrubution column it can be deduced, that you need about 4500 characters to make unknown characters of sample text about one hundredth, around 2500 to not know every 20th character and probably about 7000 to be able to read a book without checking any character in dictionary.
(Though this list is probably a bit inaccurate, when it comes to these really rare characters as their not even in dictionaries and yet their frequency would suggest that they're in quite regular use)

What about to be literate in IT/science/Engineering terms ?


Or do enough "ordinary" terms get reused
eg http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/cn/DeviceDoc/41291e_cn.pdf


MandarinBoy you wouldn't have an cisco manuals in chinese ?

@icebear: Unfortunatly they dont tell you that, but there is really no use in learning characters by them self if its not a one character word anyway. On their homepage it says:

The TOCFL for Level 4 is designed for:

- non-native speakers of Chinese.
- test takers who have taken 480-960 hours of Chinese courses in Taiwan or 960-1920 hours in countries and areas other than Taiwan.
- test takers who have acquired a vocabulary base of 5000 words.


The TOCFL for Level 5 is designed for:

- non-native speakers of Chinese.
- test takers who have taken 960 hours of Chinese courses in Taiwan or 1920 hours in countries and areas other than Taiwan.
- test takers who have acquired a vocabulary base of 8000 words.

@alxx, sorry no. I have some for Juniper and for Riverbed but nothing for Cisco. Currently I try to read a HULFT manual in Japanese. Way out of my language league. Interesting this with local software\hardware. HULFT have some 90% of the Japanese market for data transfer etc but i have never seen it outside of Japan. More or less the same with the Hitachi mainframe we currently rewrite all source code for to IBM. I have very seldom seen any Hitachi mainframes outside of Japan either.

@noqa wrote "probably about 7000 to be able to read a book without checking any character in dictionary." That's not quite accurate, as knowing a certain number of characters doesn't imply you also know all words formed from those characters, and many words and phrases in Chinese are (to me, at least) non-obvious even if you know every character they're made up of. Some simple examples:

小人
大便
无名指
成千上万
etc.

James

The key thing to understand about the new HSK is that it is a sample test. It you look at the new HSK words, many of them are quite infrequent, especially at the higher levels. I have compared the new HSK word lists to frequency of use lists and I believe that, if you only study the top words by frequency, roughly speaking:

new HSK 4 (1.2k words) requires you to know the most frequent 4k words
new HSK 5 (2.5k words) requires you to know the most frequent 8k words
new HSK 6 (5k words) requires you to know the most frequent 16k words

Or, to put it another way, at any new HSK level, the word list only covers about one third of the words that you should really know at that level.

By contrast, I believe both the old HSK and TOCFL test word lists cover about half of the words you should know, in order to be competent at a particular level.

All of the lists tend to omit the large number of nouns, especially proper nouns that occur in normal language, as well as most informal language.