Most Frequent Chinese Characters

How many Chinese characters do you have to learn in order to read a Chinese newspaper?

An appropriate answer will be around 2,500 Chinese characters. Coverage rate of 1,000 most frequent Chinese characters on a general text is around 85%. By knowing 1,000 Chinese characters, you can recognize about 85% of all characters on a general publication like Chinese newspaper.

Following are the coverage rates of the most frequently used Chinese characters:
# of Character : Coverage rate
100 : 38%
500 : 72%
1000 : 86%
2000 : 95%
2500 : 97%
3000 : 98%

I am getting these coverage rates from MTSU Chinese Computing (Jun Da), and more from Globechinese.com and about.com.

Now suppose you know 1,000 Chinese characters, does that mean you can read 86% of the text on a newspaper?

You may have noticed the word "recognize" instead of "understand" I used in second paragraph, knowing 1,000 Chinese characters does not mean you can read and understand as much.

This happens for various reasons:

1. A Chinese character have multiple meanings, people infer its appropriate meaning from the context.
   
   Example :
   巧 (qiao3) : opportunely; coincidentally; as it happens; skillful; timely.
   巧合 (qiao3 he2) : coincidence; 巧妙 (qiao3 miao4) : ingenious; clever
   


2. Homograph disambiguation (多音字) : There are a few hundred Chinese characters that have multiple pronunciations with different meanings.
   Example :
   背 (bei1) : carry; 背 (bei4) : the back of the body
   都 (dou1) : all; 都 : (du1) : capital, metropolis
   


3. Most of Loan words in Chinese are transliterations from other languages.
   Example :
   You may know characters 美 (mei3): beautiful and 国 = 國 (guo2) : country, unless you have seen or learned the word "美国" before, you may not know it is a transliteration from "America" - The United States.
   


4. Cultural words : words which are unique to Chinese culture.
   Example :
   气功 (qi4 gong1), 做月子 (zuo4 yue4 zi), 江湖 (jiang1 hu2)
   


5. Some words are originated from 俚语 (li3 yu3) : slang; 成语(cheng2 yu3) : set phrase, Poetry, or other ancient Chinese literature
   Example :
   守株待兔 (shou3 zhu1 dai4 tu4)
   肉 包 子 打 狗, 有 去 无 回. (rou4 bao1 zi da3 gou3, you3 qu4 wu2 hui2)
   

Think that's too much for you?
Fortunately Chinese characters are like prefixes and roots in English language.

For example, 电 (dian4) means "electricity",
and from 电 we can learn following words too.

Traditional	Simplified	Pinyin	English
電冰箱	电冰箱	dian4 bing1 xiang	refrigerator
電池	电池	dian4 chi2	battery
電燈泡	电灯泡	dian4 deng1 pao1	bulb
電風扇	电风扇	dian4 feng1 shan4	electric fan
電話	电话	dian4 hua4	telephone; phone call
電腦	电脑	dian4 nao3	computer
電視	电视	dian4 shi4	television; TV

Feel more confident on learning Chinese?

On next post, I will be compiling a list of loan words in Chinese.
I am sure you will be interested to know these familiar words in Chinese. :-)