list of most frequently used Chinese characters in Mandarin?

[shenglinxian]

Hello everybody, I'm new here!

I need to take a Mandarin entrance exam at my university in 3 months (I'm trying to get into the second year).

For revising Chinese Characters, I need a list of the most frequently used characters in Mandarin ( I alredy found one for Taiwan, but it's all traditional characters, I don't understand them, I need simplyfied ones! :-( ).

The 1000 most important should suffice, 500 would also help.

If anybody can give me a link, it would be very much appreciated!

I'm sorry if a thread with this already exists, I tried a search but no result :-(

Thank you! :-D

linxian

[roddy]

I wasn't sure of any specifically simplified character frequency lists, so I went looking and found this - some guy basically compiled his own lists based on what's most frequent on the internet. It runs up to well over 3000 characters, so it's probably a bit longer than you need.

Couple of caveats:

1) This is character frequency on the internet, which will make it a bit different - ie, I don't think you'd expect to see 网 at no.27 normally. You'll probably find the Chinese characters for 'ASL?', 'XXX' and 'Cheap Viagra Online' in there too

2) Are you sure you need a character frequency list - Sounds to me like you might be better off with a word frequency list. If you use a character list you will, for example, learn 后 and 天 but never know what 后天 means. Depends on the test you will take though.

If you do decide you need a word frequency list, then I'm afraid I don't know of any arranged by frequency. The nearest thing I do know of would be to go through the HSK Word List from level 1 onwards. They are arranged alphabetically, not be frequency, but presumablyl the lower levels have the more frequent items.

Roddy

[shenglinxian]

Hi Roddy!

Thank you for your reply!

The site you found is also traditional, but I saved and might used it for further reference! :-D

(I wonder if my japanese Mac here would display simplyfied characters after all...?)

The reason why I need character list, not a word list, is:

I have been studying Mandarin for two years, 8 months of with at the BLCU in Beijing and can talk and understand fluently.

When I studied Mandarin, I only studied reading / recognizing characters.

This resulted in me being able to read out and understand about 700 characters (and many of the words you can contruct with these) and write about 100 @_@.

My teacher at my university to be told me he places great importance on writing.

So I have to learn to write some more characters, but don't know which.

The most reasonable thing seems to me to get a character frequency list and ask my prof how many characters he wants, and learn these off the list.

Of course I have to pay attention that for the characters that don't normally appear alone, I can write at least one other character to form a word with it, otherwise learning it would have been useless, I think that's your point. :-)

Ok, if anybody finds a simplified Chinese characters list of a list that specifically applies to mainland China, it would be very much appreciated.

Some more traditional lists will also help.

Thank you

Linxian

[markalexander100]

http://www.mandarintools.com/flashcard.html

http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Edporter/sampler/sampler.html#ll

[Quest]

http://www.dailychinese.com.au/3500.html

[roddy]

Looks simplified to me . . .

Roddy

[shenglinxian]

thanks everybody for their postings.

the flashcard thing is usefull, and I found something on www.zhongwen.com.

It looks simplified to you, Roddy? Since you're an admin, I trust you can tell the difference.... maybe my comp displays it differently. For example, the eleventh character "qing" is written with the small "yan" at the left side spelled out, same as 25 and 34, 55 is written with 3 little boxes on top o the "way", etc...

anyway, thanks everybody :-D

[roddy]

That's really wierd, I'm seeing the simplified version of those characters. What's everyone else seeing?

Roddy

[Junior]

Mine came up in simplified characters, but (dunno what to do if your using a mac, but on a pc...) if you right click and go to encoding you can change it from simplified to traditional and vice-versa.

Hope that helps, it worked for me anyway!

[yonglan]

I'm a little late for the OP, but for the archive there's also

http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/

and

http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/chifreq/

[bhchao]

Sorry for the late response. But here is a book that might have been a good fit for your needs. There is a Volume One and a Volume Two. Both have 250 characters each, shows you the simplified and full form of each character, and teaches you how to write each character stroke by stroke.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0804833591/qid=1096721805/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/002-1431110-3897668?v=glance&s=books

[LongShiKong]

As I've written elsewhere, BEWARE of such frequency lists -- seems their source texts / webpages are not all that representative of the language in general--they exclude many common characters and at the same time include a lot of rare ones. I've found this in more than one such list.

[OneEye]

I'm sure you're a bit late to help the OP.

[paotale]

http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html.

Too late but I've used this in the past