Why 3,000 Chinese characters is not enough

Start learning Chinese characters for free at https://hanzihero.com

Many new learners erroneously believe that knowing 3,000 characters is enough to read aloud and fully understand most Chinese texts. Unfortunately, this is not true in practice. In this video I go over why 3,000 characters is not enough, and why organically picking up new characters in Chinese is so hard.

Q: "But Chinese is phonetic... sometimes..."
A: Chinese characters do indeed have minor phonetic aspects, but these are primarily of analytical rather than inferential help. I'll cover this in a future video.

Easily memorize Chinese characters:
https://youtu.be/7mNwBzRGfzw

Marilyn Method mnemonics (that HanziHero uses):
https://youtu.be/lRGjRLHkqiI

Character frequency list that shows cumulative frequency of characters.
Scroll down to see that 3,000 indeed hits the 99% cumulative frequency mark.
https://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/list.php

Why Chinese is So Damn Hard (touches on non-phonetic aspect):
https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

The 47,000 character dictionary referenced:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary

Table of General Standard Chinese Characters (8,105 total):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_General_Standard_Chinese_Characters

00:00 - Introduction
00:45 - How many characters exactly?
02:08 - 3,000 for proficiency, not mastery
02:43 - The proficiency-mastery gap
03:08 - Learning via context in English
04:03 - Learning via context in Chinese
05:18 - HanziHero
05:55 - Conclusion

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