How Do You Find Out How Many Characters You Can Actually Read?

[Shi Tong]

Hello.

I've been struggling to find out just how many characters I actually know how to write and read. Mainly because I've just been practicing those characters that are more difficult for me (I wont bother redoing things like "中, 人, 火" etc).

I've actually learned about 400 "new" characters to add to my very easy starting vocabularly, but how then do I find out how many more characters I can write, (save going through word lists for the first 500 characters on 小马词典?... or is that the only way?!) ;)

Thanks in advance for help!

Also, if there is a topic already like this somewhere (which i've searched for and cant find), please merge it or move it.

Thanks!!!!

[doraemon]

Here

This is a link for an online Chinese character test. You can find out how many characters you recognise (but not write). It's not very accurate though, but it's quite fast and convenient. ;)

[Shi Tong]

hahaha.. you're right, it's not very good at all, it came back with a result of LESS characters than I actually know!!!! ;)

[renzhe]

Take a list of the most common 3000 characters and count.

[trevelyan]

Why do you really want to know? You're much better off just focusing on what you can read rather than trying to quantify things so abstractly. Knowing random characters out of context doesn't help with understanding the proper use of bigrams, trigrams, etc. which is where most of the work in vocabulary building comes in anyway.

[jbradfor]

I find it useful, as a rough estimate of my Chinese level, and to see if I really did remember those characters. But it is flawed.

Anyone away of a tool that uses words instead of characters?

[renzhe]

Keeping track of exactly how many characters you know is an extreme motivation boost.

[jbradfor]

Well...... It can be, if you're actually learning new characters

[Hofmann]

In order for such a test to be valid, it cannot be multiple choice. Pinyin is easy to evaluate, but it would probably take a human to evaluate whether or not your translation is good.

[roddy]

Knowing how many characters you know might not actually improve your Chinese any, but it can be (as Renzhe says) valuable for the organization and motivation of study. "Ok, this exam requires knowledge of 1000 characters. I know 450. There are 11 weeks to the exam. 55 characters a week, one week of review - doable." Or "Cool, I learned 30 new characters this week."

How to do it is a different matter. Probably the best way is just to keep track somehow, and at the start this wouldn't be too onerous. Look at a textbook you've finished, tot up the characters - there are often lists at the back. The online tests are I guess ok for curiosity value, but it's basically just a progressively accurate guess. Renzhe's suggestion to just count isn't a bad one - we're not actually talking huge numbers, if you have a list ordered by frequency you can work your way up until you basically don't know any.

If you haven't already look at Skritter - if you use it for character learning it will tell you exactly how many you know, and less encouragingly, how many you've forgotten this week.

I always liked to have figures to look at - reading a book I'd time myself on a couple of pages and then figure out how long it should take to finish the thing. It's not for everyone though.

[murrayjames]

Do you use SRS, like Anki or Mnemosyne? It's helpful for memorizing and keeping track of things you already know.

Here's a list of Chinese characters by frequency. You can check yourself against the list, as Renzhe suggested:

http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/list.php?Which=MO

[anonymoose]

I always liked to have figures to look at - reading a book I'd time myself on a couple of pages and then figure out how long it should take to finish the thing

But it can be a hassle converting minutes into weeks, months and years.

[HerrPetersen]

Like suggested above you can use Anki and withing Anki the Hanzi-Counter-Plugin (sp?). I use it but usually take of 10% because of my fail-rate of around 10%.

[calibre2001]

Just go to http://hmarty.free.fr/hanzi/ and on the left side select characters under the HSK level you want to test yourself. Print out the list and start crossing out what you know.

[renzhe]

Just go to http://hmarty.free.fr/hanzi/ and on the left side select characters under the HSK level you want to test yourself. Print out the list and start crossing out what you know.

Be careful though, the list on xiaoma cidian is NOT the list of all characters per HSK level, but all single-character WORDS of a certain HSK level. There are other words at the same level which have characters that are not listed there. Many common characters which only appear in compounds are not listed.

So I'd suggest the frequency lists, which are available at the same location.

[Shi Tong]

Thanks very much for all the replies.

Yeah, one of the main reasons I want to know exactly how many characters I actually know is because when I learned Chinese for 3 months back 9 years ago :blink: I remembered quite a lot of the simple characters. I'm not sure how many this is quantifyably- it may be as few as 100, or as many as 400, and I know I can read a lot more than I can write, so this also doesn't help.

The other reason is that I was thinking about buying some simple books, ones with character limits (like hanyufong), but I'm not sure what my limit is, or what I can read- it also doesn't tell me how many I can write either.. ;)

I've just started relearning to write, and have learned 400ish new characters, ones which are more complex than the simplest characters.

Yes, I could simply sit down and write the simple characters out until I run out of things I "know", but again, it's boring..

A 3000 character list is useful, and I have gone through that kind of thing before, but it is very arduous and I dont have all that much time.

I think actually that there really isn't going to be an easy way of doing this, so I'll just have to spend the time doing it!

[renzhe]

My reply might not have sounded serious, but it was. It will take you one or two excruciating, painful, devastating hours, but at the end, you'll have an exact list of all characters you know. It's a good investment.

3000 characters is 3-4 pages of text, if you format it well. Go through them one by one and circle all characters where you know at least one pinyin/meaning pair. To make it interesting, have your wife control it. It's not too bad.

[Shi Tong]

Yeah, I think it's certainly a valid way through renzhe, and it's pretty impossible for me to know any over 3000 character words, so it would limit it correctly.

I will probably find a less hard on the eyes list and take a long stare at it tonight (using my hour/ two hour session) and see if I can come up with an accurate number! :blink: I might not be able to write English afterwards, let alone Mandarin!

[renzhe]

I'd suggest the xiaoma cidian lists, but they are simplified, and you'll probably be better off with traditional characters. I don't know where to get a nice list.

Essentially, you need a list of characters (and only characters), cut and paste them into a word processor, select a nice big font, and reformat it so there are 20 characters per line or something. Then you have a few pages of characters and you're good to go.

That's what I did years ago, but I don't think that I have the original document anymore -- I didn't use it ever since switching to Mnemosyne.

[JonBI]

And how many of these characters does one only know in combination, and how to count those? It isn't as easy to call up the classical meaning or wide range of a character until you get to the advanced level anyway, unless you are using older courseware. Certainly most people do not study characters but words, and as such, to count exactly is difficult. Doesn't matter, that Algorithm posted above is rather crappy. My numbers were drastically different each time I did it.