How many Characters in 3 yrs?

[imron]

Reasonably official. It was in an HSK practice book that was going over all the different sections. I forget which one it was, but it's something I saw quite recently, i.e. in the last couple of months.

[Guest realmayo]

At least based on the vocabulary lists floating around the net.

Does anyone know if these are genuine? The one I've seen has plenty of translation mistakes, and one or two very unusual characters.

[roddy]

The one at chinese-forums.com/vocabulary (not sure this still works 100%, if it ever did) was typed in based on an HSK 大纲, albeit several years ago. I don't think there have been any changes (probably because the HSK people pay a lot less attention to those lists than the people taking the exam). Don't rely on them too much though - as I think I've said before, any list which has 手榴弹 and not 充值卡 is not one you want to use exclusively. If I remember correctly, hskflashcards.com, yellowbridge and Pleco have all used those lists when producing their own . . products.

Edit: to comment on translation mistakes and odd characters: There's no 'official' translation of the vocab, nor would you expect there to be. There are no doubt versions based on various dctionaries (the English in the link above was taken from Adso, but again years back), but that would only be as good as the dictionary, and the editor. 把 for example appears three times at two different levels, you shouldn't just dump the same definition in for each - you need to consider what usages students should know for each level. As for odd characters, I don't know. There is, I think, a 'supplementary list' of characters somewhere, not sure.

Edited April 16, 2009 at 11:40 AM by roddy

[renzhe]

Yeah, they are best used as a gauge of progress and a list of things that one should really know. I don't concentrate too hard on memorising the party-committee nomenclature or the exact characters for "Communist Youth League", but most of the words in there are extremely useful.

It's certainly not a comprehensive list of everything that you will see in an HSK test, but if you're planning to do well, you should certainly know all the vocabulary for your level.

[Scoobyqueen]

At my university: between 3600 and 4200 hanzi.

For these 3600/4200 hanzi, we must know reading, writing, pronouncing all of them

Would this be a high requirement for a Chinese person within a three year period - reading, writing and pinyin (especially writing) so many individual characters?

I guess you cannot compare it to the normal school curriculum but maybe with an overseas Chinese already able to speak the languague who is learning how to read, write and the pinyin.

[rezaf]

That number is crazy. Of course One can just spend a few months learning to read and write thousands of characters but if by 4200 characters you mean learning them through learning vocabulary then that would be a huge vocabulary. After 2500 characters learning new characters becomes more and more difficult because the vocabulary will grow very big. I think if an average student works very hard on his vocabulary then he would master about 3000 characters after 3 years.

[Dashu]

It depends whether you mean characters or words. I learnt 600 words in 6 months but I suppose you go faster at the beginning and then stall after a few months.

Also it depends a lot on your exposition to the language: maybe your will learn a lot of words in the context, and also idioms, slang, etc in China, whereas in a Western uni you will vocabulary will be closer to a book. I suppose there's a lot more in learning Chinese than just the hanzi, and that's harder to catch when you're not in China.