Are there any stuff like "1000 must-know vocab in Chinese"?

[zozzen]

my friend wants to learn Chinese and he's got a list of most common chinese characters (around 2500?) to study. that's quite impractical because most Chinese vocab goes with two or more characters. When he knows thoroughly the meaning of 知 and 道, it helps nothing if he doesn't know these two words can make 知道.

So I'm wondering if there's a list of 1000+ or 2000+ must-know vocab for everyday conversation?

[Hedge]

He could use the HSK lists, http://www.chinese-forums.com/vocabulary/.

If he is a beginner I would recommend following a texbook. Check this thread for suggestions.

[renzhe]

Yeah, the HSK lists are the closest there is. He can start with level 1 and work his way up, all the way to more than 6000 multi-character words.

[creamyhorror]

How useful is the HSK vocab? Does it focus more on useful everyday words, or on newspaper-type words? Or even on literary expressions? I ask because I'm trying to learn more words that I'll need in speech and news reading, and in the past I've ended up learning (and forgetting) a fair number of words that are basically confined to literary and descriptive writing.

If anyone has suggestions on lists of must-know vocab with a strong practical, live-in-China bent, do suggest them.

[roddy]

I'd look at the HSK lists, or vocab lists from a textbook course (NPCR ones are available I think), or perhaps even a phrasebook designed for travellers - that should have plenty of basic vocab in it.

[the.yangist]

HSK Flashcards has vocab from a handful of introductory textbooks.

I was more head first, myself. Instead of getting the introductory Chinese books in English, I went for the introductory English books in Chinese. Those books are a.) harder, b.) more interesting and relevant to actual conversation, and c.) virtually immune to Chinese grammatical error.

There's also frequency research that shows that about 90% of the written language can be covered in 925 characters, so I would just start there if you wanted to go a cheaper route.

[roddy]

He's specifically looking for words, not characters.

[renzhe]

How useful is the HSK vocab? Does it focus more on useful everyday words, or on newspaper-type words?

It's a mixture, but the first 2000 or so are really "must-know" in every possible sense of the word, so it doesn't matter.

Personally, I find most of the words in there to be very useful, as I run into them in TV shows, articles, books, etc. There is some less useful stuff in there ("Communist Youth League", etc.), but most of the stuff is really important.

I believe that anyone aiming to be proficient at Chinese should learn all the HSK vocabulary sooner or later and expand on that. Someone trying to get fluent at speaking first might want to finish the first two levels of the HSK first, and then watch lots of TV shows and practice conversation and gather vocabulary from there. It might still make sense to screen the new vocabulary against the HSK list to avoid learning expressions that really aren't that common.

[rob07]

There is some less useful stuff in there ("Communist Youth League", etc.),

I wouldn't say that 中国共产主义青年团 is an unimportant word. Am not an expert on Chinese politics by any stretch of the imagination, but I understand the Youth League faction (团派) is one of the two main factions within the Communist party. Hu Jintao belongs to this group and many of its other members worked for Hu when he was at 共青团 in the 1980s (eg vice-premier Li Keqiang).

[atitarev]

I just recalled that Wenlin has not only character but word lists.

Check menu: Lists -> Words by frequency

beginning

的 - 40851.7 average occurrences per million characters of text

...

end

野 97.4 average occurrences per million characters of text

[roddy]

So it does. Lists 主义 in the top fifty though, so I'd guess we're looking at a 1980s newspaper corpus.

[atitarev]

无产阶级 (proletariat) is there too

It may be still OK for other, less political and technological words, I mean prepositions, pronouns, family, nature other common stuff.

[roddy]

And 革命 and 党 not far after that

But there's not much word data around, take it where you can get it . . .

[creamyhorror]

I recently got hold of A Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese, which lists the most frequent 5000 words in a 50-million-word corpus across speech, news, fiction & nonfiction (with a heavy focus on material from 80s and 90s). Good stuff. 主义 is at 2045, 革命 at 680 and 党 at 521.

野 97.4 average occurrences per million characters of text

I'm surprised 野 is at the bottom of the list. Is it because this is counting only its use as an independent word?

[the.yangist]

I just created an applet that runs on exactly the kind of corpus you describe.

The original corpus can be found here: http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/frqc/internet-zh.num .