Where to find list of characters which can be used alone?

[sangajtam]

Where can i find a list of characters which can be used alone, on its own, like for example:

好

and those which are never or very rarely used alone?

 

[imron]

I'm not sure where you can find one, however some dictionaries (such as the ABC Chinese-English dictionary) provide this information for each entry but not in any sort of easily accessible list.

 

Out of curiosity, why are you interested?

[sangajtam]

I am interested because i thought it would be helpful in learning Chinese,.

[roddy]

It won't be as helpful as you think. 

 

Find a wordlist and figure out how to sort by length in a spreadsheet - shouldn't be too hard. 

[陆咔思]

I once spent some time trying to figure this out, it's really not that easy. Finding a wordlist alone won't help you much, at least with the wordlists I've tried, because they contation pretty much all common characters as words too. I tried to make some computations to figure this out myself, like comparing character frequency with frequency of the words that contain the character, but that didn't help much either - it seems almost all of the 1000 most common characters actually appear on their own (or as parts of words that aren't in the dictionary, like names, transliterations, etc) quite often. Rarer characters are more often bound  (i.e. not used on it's own), basically I think the rarer a character the more likely it is to be bound, but that won't help you much unless you're very advanced.

 

If you really want this information ABC Dictionary is probably the best source (and generally an awesome dictionary). but it probably won't be very useful for learning.

[tysond]

I have Yong Ho's "Chinese-English Frequency Dictionary" which has 500 most common characters, usage examples, compound words, etc.

 

This is quite useful for seeing how these characters are used - most have several distinct usages and many play grammatical roles, and this book goes through each usage case and there are lots of example sentences.

 

The new edition has a different name but it looks like the same concept.

http://www.amazon.com/Concise-Chinese-English-Usage-Dictionary-Characters/dp/0781812933