Assuming 6000 characters and 3 months that’s 66 characters a day. Assuming 3000 characters and 3 months that’s 33 characters a day. I’d say anything more than 15 characters a day is exhausting for the average person. If you got several hours free a day and the willpower of a god then maybe you could do 33 a day but you wouldn’t actually know how to use them until you progress to that level in the language anyways.
Thanks much for the video. I was one of the guys that requested this. I'm the weirdo that has been studying for 5 plus years, 100% with Pinyin only and ZERO character comprehension....lol😂😂. I can see that you explained it on solid, REAL way. I felt I was getting the real scoop on the process, not some BS thing saying "it'll be fun and easy because the characters all look like mini pictures"...lol.... we know that is probably less than 25%, right? Anyway, I have tons of work to do
Yeah it’s a big task no matter what way you approach it. But the fact you’ve got 5 years of pinyin will at least lower the memory load a bit when associating characters with sounds / full words.
I started learning chinese 3 years ago. My teacher started using characters immediately, but with pinyin. At home I started my journey, with the teacher 30/50 min a week, doing hsk1, at home learning all the rest, ESPECIALLY radicals (simplified, traditional and some strange japanese variation). At the moment I know like 170 of them very well and it really makes a difference, even reading japanese kanji is possible 😂😂😂 even thou the meaningbus a bit archaic in japanese. I know how to write, read, say and listen to roughly 600 characters/word. I completely agree with you, your method is the one which is working, better than mine because I have many difficulties given the knowledge is very fragmented. I wasted a lot of time as you said, and I am trying tobuid up phrases like you recommend. But it is very difficult in my case, because I have formed a bad habit. 😅 thanks for sharing!!
Unfortunately everyone kind of needs to go through this phase and only in retrospect do you realise what you should have done. I can teach people what to look out for but even then going to be hard without building a full course haha.
As someone who's been learning Chinese for 10 years and knowing about 9000 characters (I've basically written down all the characters I know in a notebook, so this number is very accurate), it's 100% true what he's saying. DO NOT believe any native speaker saying that knowing anything less than 5000 characters is enough, they have no idea what they're talking about since they're very detached from the topic of learning Chinese. I highly recommend dabbling in oracle bone inscriptions, bronze inscriptions and seal script. Learning a bit about the evolution of characters has helped me more than anything (radicals are of course still the foundation).
Interesting that you have to just learn tones reading. Is that right? I guess that's a benefit in VN. It not only tell you which tone, but it corresponds visually to what it does. No marking: flat, line goes up: raising tone, line goes down: dropping tone. The root thing is interesting too though. VN has lots of root parts and sometimes you can get a meaning from the sum of its parts, but more often it's completely different. If you don't have the whole sentence you don't get the parts. The traditional/simplified thing reminds me of the Northern and Southern VN accents. My wife's family is all southern, but all national media is northern and maybe some of her college influence is more northern (not sure). But you want to focus on one, but there's no avoiding the other. We could have bypassed all these problems though if they'd just learn Esperanto. Six years we've been married, no progress there. "What's the wifi password" "Esperanto" "How do you spell that?" *Heart breaks*
Haha the wife one his close to home. Yeah pinyin includes tone markers but the Chinese characters themselves don’t. Basically you just need to manually learn the tone of every character and sometimes you can guess it based on phonetic components (but rarely) as they note carry sound meaning.
Only characters i know by heart are those for China. Although i suppose, i also know Jade and King by default in knowing Country. :). I heard that Chinese kids learn Sound-Meaning repeatedly and then once they know that "word" they learn word-character repeatedly. So they grind their own language. Why do i know the character I know without being a student of Chinese? I think because i learnt it and wrote it down a few times. And we come back to the technique known as Scriptorium by Prof Arguiles (sp?).
Yes, they grind their own language but they also have the benefit of seeing it everyday everywhere they look so they get a massive amount of passive input.
Kiam mi lernis la japanan, mi pasigis monaton lernante japanajn signojn kun Anki de la libro Remembering The Kanji kaj elpensante mnemonikojn, provante vidi skemojn. Mi pauzis mian studadon kaj studetis la chinan tiutempete, kaj trovis, ke la chinaj signoj estis tre facilaj (por legi, ne skribi) In Japanese, each character has 2 or more sounds so reading feels impossible. Much much easier in Chinese
I wasn’t aware Japanese had multiple pronunciations for them! Uff that sucks. But at least there’s like only 1200 from memory? I could be totally wrong though. Chinese is like an endless growing list lol.
I'd say about 2300 or so is plenty, most of the names aren't going to come up enough to be a big headache and often have an intuitive reading. It's the Jōyō kanji that will be a gigantic hurdle, but the multiple readings are usually simple enough to separate. it's just "learning a character" can't ever be that, except the few that do have only one reading, but those are outnumbered by characters with 3+ readings so it's not even a fully consistent rule you can internalize. That all said, mistaking this difficulty as a hurdle you should opt into avoiding is a common beginner trap. Seeing a character in one form is often beneficial to remembering the other, as you're learning to differentiate them. "Hardest way to use Chinese characters" is different to it being unintuitive or bad.
I've never yet seen great advice how to learn the characters as a adult second language learner. I think calling out learning the common components is decent if obvious and a bit deceptive advice. Obvious because everyone first thinks to treat it as an alphabete and deceptive because every list of radicals is not really what you want and often includes both useless things like a single stroke or two and very complex things like the whole kanji for turtle. Radicals are just keys for dictionaries, so searching for lists of radicals will not help in the end. I learned many (3000~?) for Japanese and I have to be honest my method was bad and I think most people who get there just sort of somehow or other stumble into acquiring them through many activities and attempts. You sorta have to learn them to be able to look back and notice what the actual patterns you should have learned first to make it easier would have been, even if you were actively trying to categorise and learn them your first go. I'd write a guide of what I think would work but A: I'd probably be wrong and B: ChatGPT makes me unsure how to even do anything with intellectual property now (last minute non-sequitur of anxiety successfully inserted). nice video overall, gives an accurate picture of the size of the task and some decent strategies to carrying it out
Oh, my gosh, accepting that this is impossible and there's no shame using the pinyin was the best thing for me 😂.. using romanji is so frowned upon in Korean and Japanese but I had to give up and just use the pinyin graciously 😂.
@Evildea I'm still learning them 😂. I just meant, I stopped feeling guilty about using pinyin lol. I write them side by side and use it when I'm reading. Some of the common hanzi I recognize even if I can't remember the sound I at least remember what it means 🥰.
@@DanielleBaylor I am learning slowly - 66 years , and I do speak seven languages already. it makes it becoming difficult "to find a word" -... Speaking my mothertongue, dutch, recently I couldn't find "file" or "verkeersopstopping", neither in french ( embouteillage, bouchon), nor in english ( traffic jam) , only came "atasco" ( spanish ! )... Means , learning chinese, it comes slowly, however I can translate the pinyin of HSK1 , HSK2 and most of HSK 3. But a lot less Hanzi. People speak to quick , the words don't come quick enough, I am still translating too much, in stead of thinking in chinese... So i got lost.... That said, it happens often enough that I know already the meaning of a hanzi before I know how to read it...Hanzi- dutch/french/english - Pin yin ! So I know the meaning of the Hanzi, but can't say it untill I made the translation to the indo-european language that wants to tell me what it means.........and THAN I will find the "Pin Yin"-pronunciation... ...
@cauwenberghsroeland8607 7 languages??? That's amazing! I would be happy that to be bilingual 😭. Im 37 and have goals to become a polyglot by my 50s. I'm certainly not to your degree, but I do notice that when I'm learning one language I won't remember it on that language but I will in the other. Japanese and Chinese aren't the same, but they share a few characters so sometimes it does confuse me 🥲. Or I'll see the symbol and know the English translation but not what the Chinese word is. I'm determined though. I'm always impressed and amazed by people that can speak multiple languages 😍😍😍
Ĉu vi provis memorhelpilojn, kiel la Marilyn-metodon, aŭ tiun de HanziHero, aŭ tiun de Mandarin Blueprint? Konkrete por ĉiu karaktero oni elpensas historion kun loko, rolulo, aĵoj kaj agoj. Loko kaj rolulo reprezentas la elparolon (pinyin kaj tono), la aĵoj representas la karakterajn komponaĵojn, kaj la rezulto de la ago reprezentas la karakteran signifon. Mi tiel parkerigis kelkdek karakterojn kune kun iliaj elparoloj kaj signifoj kaj sukcesas memori ilin dum sufiĉe longa tempo
Jes, tiuj metodoj estas bonaj por malgrandaj grupoj sed kiam estas miloj oni povas facile komenci konfuzi la etajn rakontojn ĉar ju pli multe vi lernas des pli ili similiĝas. Ekzeple 来, 未, 末.
Yeah, I tried learning Japanese characters many years before. The images they are based on did not work. If I tried again, I would do it by brushing them daily, not by looking at them.
@@constantwin I have aphantasia and so that may not work for me. I made cardboard flashcards but after a while all the images just blended together. I do not understand how to advance Anki manually and I do not do well on a timer even with a Latin alphabet. I need to take my time. Last, I did not have Evildea's charts and so, even if I had succeeded, it was a dead end.
@@constantwin Evildea has the right idea; you have to use the language. I had no way to practice it, other than flashcards. And flashcards are disconnected bits of information, larger or smaller, but disconnected all the same. When I learned Lithuanian, I wrote the vocabulary lists by hand, but that is the Latin alphabet. The oriental writing elements are not fixed in my memory the same way. I agree that once an element is fixed in my brain, there is no need to write it anymore. But I think writing it until then would be helpful for me. And I would write with a brush because there is a procedure for writing each character. Fortunately I have no more interest to learn such languages, so it is all academic for me at this point.
There's something not accurate about "蝴蝶" (Google Translator's fault). "蝴" has no meaning in fact, and cannot be used as a single word or morpheme. Meanwhile, we use words like "菜粉蝶" and "蛱蝶" (types of butterfly).
@@vilimvilimovich1312 I’m aware of that but if you look up the character in a dictionary it will just associate it with butterfly or say meaningless form. But the point was that there’s no point learning these by themselves.
There are worse ways: just repeating to write them has no sense. The less idiot is to know the 214 keys and learn the little story of the hanzi (why there are these characters in a hanzi).
I got into studying them (well, hanja) through my study of Korean, so I mainly focus on the ones that used to be taught standardly in Korea, although I did end up getting a book that goes beyond those (just haven't had a chance to get into it yet). Have you ever heard of Blissymbolics? It's really neat. The creator (Charles Bliss, I think), was inspired by Chinese characters (but he didn't actually know Chinese, so his system works differently). Blissymbolics is basically a purely pictographic/ideographic writing system (so, it's a universal, written language), but it was made according to a very logical system, so it's actually pretty easy to learn.
Yes I know all about Blissymbols. I had a friend even by a little book on it and learn a bit. It because a bit popular at Ontario Crippled Children's Centre.
Sorry ! There is an excellent way to learn Hanzi ! Love a chinese woman of Canton, learn Mandarin, and discover that you will have to write ( somehow unconfortable in the bed , but there, you don't really need words ).
I disagree with this video You dont need to know that many characters 3500 to 4500 characters is what is known by a college student in china 说说 chinese on her youtube channel spoke about this ruclips.net/video/pz1Tjp5VJDE/видео.htmlsi=oDCJhZBv8gKobyBV
@@123456789tube100 Natives usually underestimate what they need as they learn many passively over decades of living the language. Just like English speakers are usually unaware of the complexities of their own language. I provided an article that said a minimum of 4,400 was needed to read a novel and HSK 6 only really gets you halfway there. So I disagree with her.
@Evildea she got that answer through searching for it on the Chinese internet utilising a chinese search So you could be correct but at the same time it just seems to insane to know that amount of characters
@Evildea I agree though that hsk 6 is nothing as I am using duchinese and blasting through the stories and frankly according to their app I'm an upper intermediate but frankly I can't even read the signs in chinatown melbourne
@@123456789tube100 Yeah, and it’s also complicated by the fact that traditional Chinese characters can often be very divergent from simplified characters. So if you learn 4,500 you’ll be in an amazing position but you’ll still be looking up several characters a page when reading a novel for natives and you’ll probably still be guessing stuff, especially, if it’s written in traditional characters and you learned simplified. In any case, it’s a lot of characters and you’ll probably never truly stop learning.
I thought you could make mnemonic associations and learn them all in 3 months.
No you learn it best in your 😴 💤. Lol
Not a single person now or in history has known ALL the characters. Just like how nobody knows all the words in the OED.
Assuming 6000 characters and 3 months that’s 66 characters a day. Assuming 3000 characters and 3 months that’s 33 characters a day. I’d say anything more than 15 characters a day is exhausting for the average person. If you got several hours free a day and the willpower of a god then maybe you could do 33 a day but you wouldn’t actually know how to use them until you progress to that level in the language anyways.
ALL ? Joke ! Even not ONE Chinese knows them all....
@@cauwenberghsroeland8607 you clearly haven't purchased a hyperpolyglot course yet.
Thanks much for the video. I was one of the guys that requested this.
I'm the weirdo that has been studying for 5 plus years, 100% with Pinyin only and ZERO character comprehension....lol😂😂.
I can see that you explained it on solid, REAL way. I felt I was getting the real scoop on the process, not some BS thing saying "it'll be fun and easy because the characters all look like mini pictures"...lol.... we know that is probably less than 25%, right?
Anyway, I have tons of work to do
Yeah it’s a big task no matter what way you approach it. But the fact you’ve got 5 years of pinyin will at least lower the memory load a bit when associating characters with sounds / full words.
I always guess 4th tone because there's a 40% chance it'll be right lol
May the odds be ever in your favor!
I started learning chinese 3 years ago. My teacher started using characters immediately, but with pinyin. At home I started my journey, with the teacher 30/50 min a week, doing hsk1, at home learning all the rest, ESPECIALLY radicals (simplified, traditional and some strange japanese variation). At the moment I know like 170 of them very well and it really makes a difference, even reading japanese kanji is possible 😂😂😂 even thou the meaningbus a bit archaic in japanese. I know how to write, read, say and listen to roughly 600 characters/word. I completely agree with you, your method is the one which is working, better than mine because I have many difficulties given the knowledge is very fragmented. I wasted a lot of time as you said, and I am trying tobuid up phrases like you recommend. But it is very difficult in my case, because I have formed a bad habit. 😅 thanks for sharing!!
Unfortunately everyone kind of needs to go through this phase and only in retrospect do you realise what you should have done. I can teach people what to look out for but even then going to be hard without building a full course haha.
As someone who's been learning Chinese for 10 years and knowing about 9000 characters (I've basically written down all the characters I know in a notebook, so this number is very accurate), it's 100% true what he's saying. DO NOT believe any native speaker saying that knowing anything less than 5000 characters is enough, they have no idea what they're talking about since they're very detached from the topic of learning Chinese. I highly recommend dabbling in oracle bone inscriptions, bronze inscriptions and seal script. Learning a bit about the evolution of characters has helped me more than anything (radicals are of course still the foundation).
Thanks for saying this! So many people keep telling me I’m wrong and referring back to random native speakers lol. I’m gonna pin your comment!
You should review language simps video reviewing Chinese. You'd get a kick out of that lol
I’ll add it to the list :D
I don't buy bullshit, I rent it.
My man has figured out the cheat code
Interesting that you have to just learn tones reading. Is that right? I guess that's a benefit in VN. It not only tell you which tone, but it corresponds visually to what it does. No marking: flat, line goes up: raising tone, line goes down: dropping tone. The root thing is interesting too though. VN has lots of root parts and sometimes you can get a meaning from the sum of its parts, but more often it's completely different. If you don't have the whole sentence you don't get the parts. The traditional/simplified thing reminds me of the Northern and Southern VN accents. My wife's family is all southern, but all national media is northern and maybe some of her college influence is more northern (not sure). But you want to focus on one, but there's no avoiding the other.
We could have bypassed all these problems though if they'd just learn Esperanto. Six years we've been married, no progress there.
"What's the wifi password"
"Esperanto"
"How do you spell that?"
*Heart breaks*
Haha the wife one his close to home. Yeah pinyin includes tone markers but the Chinese characters themselves don’t. Basically you just need to manually learn the tone of every character and sometimes you can guess it based on phonetic components (but rarely) as they note carry sound meaning.
Only characters i know by heart are those for China. Although i suppose, i also know Jade and King by default in knowing Country. :). I heard that Chinese kids learn Sound-Meaning repeatedly and then once they know that "word" they learn word-character repeatedly. So they grind their own language. Why do i know the character I know without being a student of Chinese? I think because i learnt it and wrote it down a few times. And we come back to the technique known as Scriptorium by Prof Arguiles (sp?).
Yes, they grind their own language but they also have the benefit of seeing it everyday everywhere they look so they get a massive amount of passive input.
Kiam mi lernis la japanan, mi pasigis monaton lernante japanajn signojn kun Anki de la libro Remembering The Kanji kaj elpensante mnemonikojn, provante vidi skemojn. Mi pauzis mian studadon kaj studetis la chinan tiutempete, kaj trovis, ke la chinaj signoj estis tre facilaj (por legi, ne skribi)
In Japanese, each character has 2 or more sounds so reading feels impossible. Much much easier in Chinese
I wasn’t aware Japanese had multiple pronunciations for them! Uff that sucks. But at least there’s like only 1200 from memory? I could be totally wrong though. Chinese is like an endless growing list lol.
@@Evildea more thant 2000 in a "list of most common" that does not include the characters often used in names and many others that are in use.
In that case, it also sucks for Japanese learners :/
I'd say about 2300 or so is plenty, most of the names aren't going to come up enough to be a big headache and often have an intuitive reading. It's the Jōyō kanji that will be a gigantic hurdle, but the multiple readings are usually simple enough to separate. it's just "learning a character" can't ever be that, except the few that do have only one reading, but those are outnumbered by characters with 3+ readings so it's not even a fully consistent rule you can internalize.
That all said, mistaking this difficulty as a hurdle you should opt into avoiding is a common beginner trap. Seeing a character in one form is often beneficial to remembering the other, as you're learning to differentiate them. "Hardest way to use Chinese characters" is different to it being unintuitive or bad.
I've never yet seen great advice how to learn the characters as a adult second language learner. I think calling out learning the common components is decent if obvious and a bit deceptive advice. Obvious because everyone first thinks to treat it as an alphabete and deceptive because every list of radicals is not really what you want and often includes both useless things like a single stroke or two and very complex things like the whole kanji for turtle. Radicals are just keys for dictionaries, so searching for lists of radicals will not help in the end.
I learned many (3000~?) for Japanese and I have to be honest my method was bad and I think most people who get there just sort of somehow or other stumble into acquiring them through many activities and attempts. You sorta have to learn them to be able to look back and notice what the actual patterns you should have learned first to make it easier would have been, even if you were actively trying to categorise and learn them your first go. I'd write a guide of what I think would work but A: I'd probably be wrong and B: ChatGPT makes me unsure how to even do anything with intellectual property now (last minute non-sequitur of anxiety successfully inserted).
nice video overall, gives an accurate picture of the size of the task and some decent strategies to carrying it out
Yeah, there really isn’t one single method, just strategies to lower the pain haha
Oh, my gosh, accepting that this is impossible and there's no shame using the pinyin was the best thing for me 😂.. using romanji is so frowned upon in Korean and Japanese but I had to give up and just use the pinyin graciously 😂.
Haha, maybe just learn a few here and there… like 1 a day and in like 8.2 years you’ll be able to read the basics :D
@Evildea I'm still learning them 😂. I just meant, I stopped feeling guilty about using pinyin lol. I write them side by side and use it when I'm reading. Some of the common hanzi I recognize even if I can't remember the sound I at least remember what it means 🥰.
@ Great! Do what ever makes you not quit life lol. This is a marathon not a sprint anyways.
@@DanielleBaylor I am learning slowly - 66 years , and I do speak seven languages already. it makes it becoming difficult "to find a word" -... Speaking my mothertongue, dutch, recently I couldn't find "file" or "verkeersopstopping", neither in french ( embouteillage, bouchon), nor in english ( traffic jam) , only came "atasco" ( spanish ! )...
Means , learning chinese, it comes slowly, however I can translate the pinyin of HSK1 , HSK2 and most of HSK 3. But a lot less Hanzi. People speak to quick , the words don't come quick enough, I am still translating too much, in stead of thinking in chinese... So i got lost....
That said, it happens often enough that I know already the meaning of a hanzi before I know how to read it...Hanzi- dutch/french/english - Pin yin ! So I know the meaning of the Hanzi, but can't say it untill I made the translation to the indo-european language that wants to tell me what it means.........and THAN I will find the "Pin Yin"-pronunciation... ...
@cauwenberghsroeland8607 7 languages??? That's amazing! I would be happy that to be bilingual 😭. Im 37 and have goals to become a polyglot by my 50s.
I'm certainly not to your degree, but I do notice that when I'm learning one language I won't remember it on that language but I will in the other. Japanese and Chinese aren't the same, but they share a few characters so sometimes it does confuse me 🥲. Or I'll see the symbol and know the English translation but not what the Chinese word is.
I'm determined though. I'm always impressed and amazed by people that can speak multiple languages 😍😍😍
Ĉu vi provis memorhelpilojn, kiel la Marilyn-metodon, aŭ tiun de HanziHero, aŭ tiun de Mandarin Blueprint? Konkrete por ĉiu karaktero oni elpensas historion kun loko, rolulo, aĵoj kaj agoj. Loko kaj rolulo reprezentas la elparolon (pinyin kaj tono), la aĵoj representas la karakterajn komponaĵojn, kaj la rezulto de la ago reprezentas la karakteran signifon. Mi tiel parkerigis kelkdek karakterojn kune kun iliaj elparoloj kaj signifoj kaj sukcesas memori ilin dum sufiĉe longa tempo
Jes, tiuj metodoj estas bonaj por malgrandaj grupoj sed kiam estas miloj oni povas facile komenci konfuzi la etajn rakontojn ĉar ju pli multe vi lernas des pli ili similiĝas. Ekzeple 来, 未, 末.
Yeah, I tried learning Japanese characters many years before. The images they are based on did not work. If I tried again, I would do it by brushing them daily, not by looking at them.
That’s one way although I wouldn’t have the patience for it haha
Just use Anki and write the characters once every time you don't remember them. You don't have to make the task bigger than it is.
@@constantwin I have aphantasia and so that may not work for me. I made cardboard flashcards but after a while all the images just blended together. I do not understand how to advance Anki manually and I do not do well on a timer even with a Latin alphabet. I need to take my time. Last, I did not have Evildea's charts and so, even if I had succeeded, it was a dead end.
@@constantwin Evildea has the right idea; you have to use the language. I had no way to practice it, other than flashcards. And flashcards are disconnected bits of information, larger or smaller, but disconnected all the same. When I learned Lithuanian, I wrote the vocabulary lists by hand, but that is the Latin alphabet. The oriental writing elements are not fixed in my memory the same way. I agree that once an element is fixed in my brain, there is no need to write it anymore. But I think writing it until then would be helpful for me. And I would write with a brush because there is a procedure for writing each character. Fortunately I have no more interest to learn such languages, so it is all academic for me at this point.
I am not learning Chinese but Thai. It feels like the whole writing system symbolizes my death.. 😂
Asia is out to get us bro
There's something not accurate about "蝴蝶" (Google Translator's fault). "蝴" has no meaning in fact, and cannot be used as a single word or morpheme. Meanwhile, we use words like "菜粉蝶" and "蛱蝶" (types of butterfly).
@@vilimvilimovich1312 I’m aware of that but if you look up the character in a dictionary it will just associate it with butterfly or say meaningless form. But the point was that there’s no point learning these by themselves.
There are worse ways: just repeating to write them has no sense. The less idiot is to know the 214 keys and learn the little story of the hanzi (why there are these characters in a hanzi).
Most of those are pictographic so you won’t have too many issues
Many are also ideophonographic or ideographic so it needs to dissect these
I got into studying them (well, hanja) through my study of Korean, so I mainly focus on the ones that used to be taught standardly in Korea, although I did end up getting a book that goes beyond those (just haven't had a chance to get into it yet).
Have you ever heard of Blissymbolics?
It's really neat. The creator (Charles Bliss, I think), was inspired by Chinese characters (but he didn't actually know Chinese, so his system works differently).
Blissymbolics is basically a purely pictographic/ideographic writing system (so, it's a universal, written language), but it was made according to a very logical system, so it's actually pretty easy to learn.
Yes I know all about Blissymbols. I had a friend even by a little book on it and learn a bit. It because a bit popular at Ontario Crippled Children's Centre.
Sorry ! There is an excellent way to learn Hanzi ! Love a chinese woman of Canton, learn Mandarin, and discover that you will have to write ( somehow unconfortable in the bed , but there, you don't really need words ).
Done all that lol :D
I disagree with this video
You dont need to know that many characters
3500 to 4500 characters is what is known by a college student in china
说说 chinese on her youtube channel spoke about this
ruclips.net/video/pz1Tjp5VJDE/видео.htmlsi=oDCJhZBv8gKobyBV
@@123456789tube100 Natives usually underestimate what they need as they learn many passively over decades of living the language. Just like English speakers are usually unaware of the complexities of their own language. I provided an article that said a minimum of 4,400 was needed to read a novel and HSK 6 only really gets you halfway there. So I disagree with her.
@Evildea she got that answer through searching for it on the Chinese internet utilising a chinese search
So you could be correct but at the same time it just seems to insane to know that amount of characters
@Evildea I agree though that hsk 6 is nothing as I am using duchinese and blasting through the stories and frankly according to their app I'm an upper intermediate but frankly I can't even read the signs in chinatown melbourne
@Evildea in her youtube video she gets a different answer for her search in English as opposed to in chinese.
@@123456789tube100 Yeah, and it’s also complicated by the fact that traditional Chinese characters can often be very divergent from simplified characters. So if you learn 4,500 you’ll be in an amazing position but you’ll still be looking up several characters a page when reading a novel for natives and you’ll probably still be guessing stuff, especially, if it’s written in traditional characters and you learned simplified. In any case, it’s a lot of characters and you’ll probably never truly stop learning.