what is considered literate?

[xuechengfeng]

i know there are many, many characters? but what is literate? how many would be needed to functionally read a newspaper?

thanks

[skylee]

I've learnt from a previous thread here that an average person knows about 3000 characters. Do a search and you can find that discussion.

[kentsuarez]

Hi fellow Buckeye! 2000 is often cited. I figure 2k-3k is literate, but more is better, of course, as quite a few personal names and place names which you'll encounter in the newspaper are in the 4k list. Don't let these numbers frustrate you; you'll pick them up eventually if you just focus on studying more every day.

Also, coming to Taiwan is a great way to be surrounded by Chinese characters all the time, which helps motivate you to study (e.g., just in order to be able to read menus so you can order food, or read labels in the supermarket so you can tell whether you're buying beef bits or mutton bits).

BTW, I began my Chinese studies at OSU in Galal Walker's superb Independent Study course, with great success. I'm very glad they spent so much time on pronunciation, as it really is the foundation for good Chinese. I'd be curious to hear about your experiences there; you're welcome to start a new thread on this and I'll catch you there.

Kent

(former PhD student in I/O psych at OSU, taught Psych 100 there for years, now in Taipei)

[xuechengfeng]

hi kent,

when you say Galal Walker's independent study program, are you talking about the individualized instruction courses? That's the track I am doing right now where you study lessons at home, and make 15 minute appointments w/instructors to be tested over the material. I don't know if this is what you're talking about, but I find it to be a very good approach. For me, the classroom setting doesn't give me the individual focus I need. The Chinese instructors at Ohio State right now are very good, and I really enjoy the program. Right now I'm only at about 200 characters plus, but hopefully one day I'll be literate!

Have you moved to Taipei permanently? I was planning on going to China this summer through OSU, but I didn't meet the 2 quarter requirement at the time of my application, and it was unfortunate because airplane, room and board, and 2 meals a day was 650 dollars! Now when I search it's more than 1,000 a plane ticket, and who knows how much room in board is.

[xuechengfeng]

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/1991Moser.pdf

and this article scared me! but hilarious to say the least.

[kentsuarez]

Yes, the individualized instruction courses you mention. I found the instructors to be excellent as well. I focused on the spoken aspect, emphasizing really really perfecting pronunciation, rather than written characters, which I only really started to study a few years later. Picking up a conversation partner in parallel with the program was extremely helpful, and you can probably ask the native Chinese speakers in the program if they have any friends with good pronunciation who might do a language exchange with you. There are tons of nice Chinese students on campus too. But beware of the Taiwanese students' pronunciation, as many of them fail to distinguish between the juan3she2 (retroflex tongue) like sh, ch and zh, and the opposite, like x, q, and j. So it's better not to choose one as a language exchange partner when just beginning (although they make great friends!), unless you can get someone to assess their pronunciation for you (or unless you can tell the difference yourself, already).

<<Have you moved to Taipei permanently?>>

Yes. I had planned to stay 6-18 mos., but found a very enjoyable job editing at Bank of America (which I've now done for 9 years!), and made lots of great friends, and I have continued to have an enjoyable challenge in this language environment, so I've never really had any reason to want to leave.

<< I was planning on going to China this summer through OSU, but I didn't meet the 2 quarter requirement at the time of my application, and it was unfortunate because airplane, room and board, and 2 meals a day was 650 dollars! Now when I search it's more than 1,000 a plane ticket, and who knows how much room in board is.>>

That's a shame. Well, you might still consider doing it later when you find a better price or have more cash. You might also want to consider coming to Taipei to teach English, which can pay for your continued studies.

Best of luck!

[beirne]

Keep in mind that knowing characters isn't enough. You also need to know the words that they form.

The meaning of these words are not always obvious from the combination of characters.

[Altair]

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/1991Moser.pdf

and this article scared me! but hilarious to say the least.

Xuechengfeng, this was truly a great article that confirms my experiences. Thanks for sharing.

[shandongcn]

I am an English learner.I have learned English for two years.So,could you tell me how many English words should I know, wanna be a literate?

Your answer is my answe r.

[channamasala]

My students told me not a few times that 2k-3k is considered literate for a peasant or blue-collar worker. For them (little rich kids) they were expected or already had learned upwards of 5k-10k characters. None could tell me exactly how many they knew, but that doesn't surprise me. They laughed a lot at my 500.

[channamasala]

BTW, I actually disagree with the article. The writing system IS ridiculous, I'll give it that. But at the end of the day I found learning to speak Chinese, to the sad extent I still speak it, **easier** than learning French. Maybe because I learned French in a classroom and Chinese in China? Maybe because previous to that I'd studied, and failed at learning, Tamil and Sanskrit, two more languages acclaimed for being hard as f***? Or maybe because, actually, grammatically Chinese is not really so bad??

[handbus]

Don't stop practicing.

And it doesn't matter for you to learn Chinese well if you haven't got an opportunity to go to China, since you can practice Chinese on the web by MSN or Yahoo Messenger.

Chinese Learning is a process of accumulation.

Since the basic element of Chinese is a character but not word, you can read newspaper to enlarge you vocabulary. Also the most difficult thing for most foreigners to learning Chinese that they find that they cann't read out the character correctly just by writing (another kind of spelling) it, which is quite different from other languages. So for these sake and if you are interested in the Chinese characters and words, I am glad to tell some funny stories about Chinese characters' meaning, usage, development and history, which, i think, will be helpful for you to learn Chinese characters.

不要停止练习。

没有机会来中国也不妨碍你学好中文，你完全可以通过网络、使用MSN 或者 Yahoo Messenger来练习中文。

中文学习是一种积累的过程。

由于中文的基本单位是汉字而不是单词，所以你可以通过阅读中文报纸来扩大词汇量。同时，对于很多外国人来说，学习中文最困难的就是他们不能通过书写而准确的掌握汉字的发音，这一点和其他语言有很大的区别。就这点来说，我非常乐意讲一些有关汉字意义、用途、演变和历史的趣闻轶事；相信这会对你们学习汉字有帮助

The Homework:

Please check that how many characters you can recognize in above Chinese paragraphs.

If there is a new characters for you please guess or learn it with the reference to the above English paragraphs.