One Million Characters

I remember reading his 边城 years and years ago. Can't recall now if I finished it or not, but I remember liking it...

《边城》is on my list of books to read. According to this thread in the Art and Literature sub-forum, it was rated the second best Chinese-language novel of the 20th century.

Thanks for the write-up! I assume the 牛 here is an ox, though, not a calf, despite the nickname. Or does that not fit in the story?

You are right, it’s an ox. I was confused by the pairing of 大牛伯 and 小牛. (There’s a father-son dynamic between the farmer and his ox in the text.)

Perhaps I missed it but how do you know how many characters per novel?

First I find an online version of the text. Then I paste the text into @imron’s Chinese Text Analyser, which tells me exactly how many characters the text has. I also use this website to count characters: http://zishu.xpcha.com . When I can’t find the text I’m reading online, I search for the title plus the word “字数” on Baidu or Google.

3 hours ago, murrayjames said:

I also use this website to count characters: http://zishu.xpcha.com

CTA also provides 'total' and 'unique' character count statistics.  Is it much different from that website?

1 hour ago, imron said:

CTA also provides 'total' and 'unique' character count statistics.  Is it much different from that website?

 

The website does not provide unique character statistics. It lists the total number of Chinese characters, plus counts of punctuation, spaces, English letters, etc. I use it as an alternative to CTA, usually when my computer is inaccessible.

Fair enough.  The CTA statistic for "total characters" doesn't include punctuation, whitespace and other things, but that is available under 'Total Unicode Codepoints' which is the total count for everything.

 

You can reach your goal a lot faster if you go by the 字数 stated in the book itself.

@Lu, I am glad you mentioned books overstating their 字数. This is something I have noticed and wondered about. Why exaggerate the number of characters a book contains?

 

My preferred method for counting Chinese characters is CTA. It tells me exactly how many characters a given text has. BTW, punctuation, whitespace, and English words do not count toward my 1,000,000-character goal. That would be cheating.

6 hours ago, murrayjames said:

Why exaggerate the number of characters a book contains?

Because traditionally Chinese writers write on 稿紙 and are paid by the number of pages/lines.

There's an anecdote from early 20th century in which a publisher insisted on paying by the exact character count. To teach them a lesson, a writer (I forget who) submitted his manuscript without punctuation or whitespace. The publisher caved.