..I mean, its truly impressive! I have studied Chinese for about 7 years, where 3 of them have been on my own and 4 of them in a university (all in China though), and I probably know about 2500 - 2750 characters.

My questions to you guys are:

How long have you studied Chinese for?

What do you work with? (having spent that much time learning Chinese, I presume u guys are teachers/translators?)

and...

What is your best advice for learning that many characters (and to not forget them)?



There is one thing though. I have noticed that many of the guys here who know a huge amount of characters are located in Taiwan or HongKong. Does the traditional character count as an extra character if you already know the simplified?

I.E, does 马 and 馬 count as 2 characters, or just as one?

I don't know 3000 yet, but I'm around 2500 and in my 4th year of study. But to answer your question about traditional characters, yes Skritter counts simplified and traditional as separate so 马 and 馬 count as 2 characters, not one. So technically I know 2500 characters, but a good chunk are doubles. (I actually wish there was a way to keep track of traditional + characters that are the same for both vs. simplified + characters that are the same for both because it would be easier to determine how many characters I actually know.)

Interesting, I'd never considered Skritter would just total the simplified + traditional variants together, though I suppose it's the only way to do it for people studying both as they are technically written differently.

I'd be curious to know how many people with a high number of characters are actually studying both.

I also haven't gotten to 3000, but I've only been studying simplified for about 1.5 years. While I can generally get through elementary texts with a moderate level of understanding I can't imagine being an effective translator when I hit 3000 characters. I think I might feel comfortable with on the spot translation after hitting 6000 words (and whatever number of characters that requires). The point being I place a higher value on the word statistic of Skritter when it comes to effectively understanding the language.

re: 孟志书 I'd agree. That's why last year after only using them for a few weeks I just stopped studying "most frequent character" lists. Unless you learn the character in the context of a word the knowledge isn't very helpful when you come across it in a text.

I think I'm in my 9th month of daily skrittering now, and I'm at 1500 (I put in about 10 minutes average each morning). However I would say I know over 3000 characters having already learned Japanese.

”What is your best advice for learning that many characters (and to not forget them)? ”

Lots of reading. An SRS is a useful supplement, but ultimately you need to read.

I'm on my fifth year of studying Chinese. One and a half years in China and the rest at University. For me it is all all about finding a balance between my learning. Since I'm living in China right now, it is easy to find the time the practice my Chinese, and as a result my listening and speaking skills are far above my reading and writing. However, I would say that I spend a half hour every day doing character review, a half hour a day with light reading (I use 微博 and MSN for that) and I read a Chinese novel at night before bed. I'm trying to figure out a health way to incorporate Skritter into the the mix. While traveling China it can be hard to find time (and in Internet cafe) to spend time on the site, but I'm making it work.

I should note, I am also a Chinese teacher, and going to school next semester in Taiwan for my masters degree in teaching Chinese as a second language. On of the most important things for remembering characters is to truly understand them. That means learning to break characters down into their basic components (basically the radical and other parts: 部首 and 部件). When you do that it takes up a lot less memory capacity to remember a character. I found that once I was able to successfully break down characters I was able to recall them with ease (especially when writing).

Of course like anything else you have to put in the time to learn Chinese.

你要用心学汉语！

加油

俺说句老实话，没啥捷径，只要你够疯够狠汉字就会一个一个蹦出来耶。。。

孟志书 brings up an interesting point. I think he or she is probably right that the word statistics are more important than character statistics, but since the character stats are the ones featured in the graph, I tend to track my progress based on the number of new characters I've learned rather than the number of new words. As silly as it may be, seeing the bar graph climb up really is a big motivating factor for me, to the extent that I think I sometimes favour words with new characters over those without when choosing words to add to my queue.

I wonder if it would be possible for the 小伙子 to let us personalize the graph a bit to show words instead of characters?

@junglegirl, which page did you want to customize? i already have my homepage set to show me words. you should already be able to change it. the progress page seems to remember the last one you selected, so it should also be saved.

@Foo

5000 characters O_O Although I suspect that some of them might be traditional/simplified duplicates, it's still pretty darn impressive!

How long have you studied Chinese for, and what do you do for a living?

@孟志书: Why, you're right! I never noticed you could do that. Thanks!

I'm not learning Chinese as intensely as I am Japanese, but I know over 3000 in Japanese. Using Heisig's Remembering the Kanji really helped for both remembering characters as well as deciphering meaning and pronunciation.