I'm interested in the number of unique characters I've learned. The problem is that characters are often used again in different words. It seems to me that the current progress statistics aren't eliminating duplicate characters - is this correct? If so, would you consider adding a unique characters statistic? This is really what I'm interested in - moving toward that magic "2000" literacy level.

the characters statistic is already for unique characters... this is painfully obvious to me as my words count has been flying up recently but my characters come along much more slowly than before... I'm close to hitting 1500 and I'm starting to believe those who say that 2000 and even 2500 are not really enough for "literacy," and tangentially that staring at a page full of characters you know is not the same as being able to figure out what the words and sentences mean :)

Yup, those characters are unique--you're further along than you thought you were.

2000 isn't really magic in that you'll be able to read anything. 3000 might be closer. I've recently gotten up to 2100 and I'm very pleasantly surprised by how much easier reading has become, but I haven't started to see diminishing returns from learning new characters.

I think what made me suspicious was the "tones" and character count being the same, when I know for a fact that some of the tones have been different depending on the context (that "neutral" tone especially).

I know that knowing several thousand characters isn't the same as knowing all the words in the dictionary, but I feel like knowing "enough" characters would make learning new words much much easier. Chinese words seem obvious, more often then not, if you know the meaning of the characters.

Yes, yesterday other day I was reading this Paul Graham essay:
http://www.yeeyan.com/articles/view/little/114
which was translated into Chinese from here:
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
It was very refreshing being able to figure out so many unfamiliar words based on their component characters, no problem.

But the day before that, I was trying to read this book of short, famous Chinese essays with English translations (made to help Chinese people learn English), and it was a lot harder to learn new words, even with the English to refer to. When Chinese gets all literary, it scrunches up and two-character words often elide to one character, which makes them much harder to figure out.

The tone and character counts should be similar. There's only one tone item in the system for each character, despite multiple possibilities for some characters.

in that case shouldn't the tones added be equal to the characters added? I assumed the same as thegiffman that if i learn a new word where a tone is different than the one i learned before it would be counted as a new tone learned (i.e. 首都 and 都 (dou)). Especially since my tone count has always stayed ahead of my characters by a bit (though characters seem to strangely be catching up lately).

Out of curiousity, if I learned 队长 and 长度 how many characters and tones were learned?

For those of us learning both traditional and simplified, it would be nice to know how many characters we've learned, not counting traditional vs simplified. I would think my 1850 translates to something like 1500 not counting traditional variations, but I'm not sure.

yeah....I've heard 3000-4000 characters is a reasonable target for "newspaper literacy"

队长 and 长度 would give you 3 characters, 3 tones, and 2 words. There are also items for the word-level tones, but those aren't in the progress reports.

I'm not sure why the counts are slightly different.