number of characters need to know to read a newspaper

as an English teacher in China for almost 2 1/2 years, I've encountered this test numerous times. The CET has really awkward, unusual English and teaches students such generic and meaningless phrases like "in a word," "as we all know" that become incorporated into their writing in my class. I think its a pretty dumb test that needs an overhaul by someone who is familiar with more natural English (ie a native speaker).

understood

Wikipedia says: 'CET, is a national English as a foreign language test in the People's Republic of China. The purpose of the CET is to examine the English proficiency of undergraduate students and postgraduate students in China and ensure that Chinese undergraduates and postgraduates reach the required English levels'

It also says that it is mandatory but I don't think this is true any more. But there is a lot of peer pressure, and employers like it.

I had a look at a CET 6 test paper and reckon that I might pass it but it would be a close thing. I didn't understand the vocabulary in one of the main sections of the paper - but I guess you prepare these things and learn what the questions mean. As for helping you understand the language in the real world I rate it a 5 out of 10.

'CET is a study abroad program centered in the US'

Oh ... it is that same acronym (who knows what letters stand for?) as a standard English test that lots of Chinese students undertake, even though they don't have to.

The best test is to pick up a newspaper and try to read it. Thats the gold standard, who cares how many characters you know.

"RJ's law" - no matter how many characters you learn, the next Chinese sign you encounter will only contain two that are familiar.

CET is a study abroad program centered in the US. Dont know what the letters stand for, its a secret I guess.

Thanks RJ, yes, that worked. Entertaining. I like: ' Poppycock. I couldn't comfortably read a newspaper when I had 2,000 characters under my belt. [I agree]. I often had to look up several characters per line, and even after that I had trouble pulling the meaning out of the article.' Of course it depends on what you mean by 'read'. I read the newspapers on the plane, and get the drift of what I read, but I wouldn't like to sit a test on what I read.

He says that he has been learning Chinese for six years so I assume that this article is quite dated. I couldn't see a date so it is both dated and undated. :)

Seems he is now Academic Director for CET - isn't that an English test?

Hi Zhenlijiang,

Haha, you guess brilliantly - it's almost certainly lack of interest that makes it more difficult. Not that Japanese culture lacks interesting things worth experiencing - but up to my death I won't have time to read all the fascinating things available in Chinese (particularly in the older texts). And I've never really liked learning languages for their own sake, instead mostly excited about what it offers access to, so I was kind of done with language learning after Chinese, too much too read already. Add to that the fact that I don't find chatting or even current events or normal tv interesting, so I need to get to a very high level before I can handle what I like (and I'm unlikely to ever get that good in Japanese), and my general reaction to being required to do things (反感)...

Though I don't want to sound bitter - as I actually think it's totally reasonable for them to have this requirment, it's for my development as a scholar after all- and I'm sure there will be some interesting things to discover along the way...At any rate, I'm going to give myself a good kick in the butt and get serious about it again (2nd round) these next few months.

As a side note, you mention the difficulty of English - I always think of this when people complain about the tones in Chinese, as they are what arguably saves us from having the mess of endless different sounds and pronounciations in Chinese. And Chinese often seems so much more logical than english....

Nice speaking to you again - especially since I'm about to throw myself into Japanese study again I won't be stopping by cpod that much, so in case I don't run into you again for awhile, I want to wish you good luck over this year!

Hi Tingyun, thanks for answering my question (which as usual was a real question and not rhetorical). I understand why you would object to careless reinforcement of popular fallacies rather than find it clever.

As a slower learner I always, as I only should, listen with respect to everyone, anyone, who has made much greater progress than me on the same path. So of course I would listen to and learn from David Moser too. It's just this article, which in John's opinion is excellent (and I do respect his opinion).

But I can go and painlessly read John's blog post for example and be perfectly able to empathize. And I normally would empathize with fellow learners no matter how much more advanced, and as I said in April 2009 even enjoy commiserating with peers myself.

I'd agree it's something about attitude and tone--you say the language used. Absence of genuine humility maybe? And why do I find the tone to be very US-centric? You said resentment, bitterness. It sounds to me like he feels he deserves a lot more credit from a greater public for the work he'd put in. In itself that's not really objectionable, but ...

Would have helped if he just wrote better I think.

(As long as I've mentioned US-centric, how many native speakers of English appreciate how difficult their first language is to learn? The ones who teach it do I would hope.)

And about Japanese, hmm I'm afraid it's simply because you're not interested if you find it "much more difficult". Sorry to hear you're required to do it! Cheers

I agree - it seems to be the poetic form of the San Zi Jing that makes it a challenge to understand sometimes - rather than grammar. (I could say that with more authority if I knew more grammar).

The use of the word 曰 yue1, meaning I believe ‘they say ...' (as when someone starts relating a story), 'there are ...' or (I'm less sure) 'they are ...'. This is a word I had to learn to make sense of, for example, 曰水火，木金土。 This is perhaps just vocab for me, but it may also be considered a grammatical form I guess. My interpreter however would just say '曰’没有意思 。。

The poetic form requires the message to be abbreviated, and the form requires the author to use a certain convention, eg. repetition, with a different word used the second time round. Reading it involves cracking the code.

At least the 'poems' of the San Zi Jing are not complex! I like the way the author alternates between the internal world of the individual and the external world of society.

Oh that's probabbly right, I was overstating things - I mean that it's rather similar to poetry, in that the challange does not come from any complicated grammar, and the prescribed form the of the writing (here chunks of 3) is far more influential in how things are written...though of course there are grammatical particles in use， 苟不教性乃迁 appearing in the first bit, but the grammar doesn't seem to go beyond that, ie knowing the meaning of a few grammar particles basically takes care of matters, so it feels more like vocabulary...

Incidentally, the greatest weakness in my classical chinese ability is poetry, I'm fairly hopeless working with poems of any complexity, whereas that genre seems to be the one remaining bastion of general competence among native Chinese...These skills really end up being very field specific (though lately I've been working on this...it really feels too beautiful to neglect)

'no real knowledge of how classical chinese grammer worked needed'

I see - I guess in my reading there were maybe twenty or so lines that I found difficult to grasp even after I learned the vocab, and knew the story being referred to - but this is a relatively small proportion of the total text. There are maybe twenty 'new' common word usages to learn as well, where the meaning has changed; you would call that vocabulary I guess. I worked through it with a native speaker, I rarely looked at existing translations.

Thanks for the reference!

I note your comments on the latest acquisition - yes, I expected that it would be hard going, hence my reference to looking at the pictures. As long as I learn something from it; I am not aiming for complete mastery.

Perhaps, though Japanese feels faster and more blurred than Chinese, in the same way that English is more blurred between syllables than Chinese, so maybe I got spoiled on the comparitive distinctness of Chinese (admitably not as true for all speakers and regions)

三字经 dates to the Song dynasty I think? So nearly 1000 years, with alot of revisions and additions over time. Natural there would be tons of allusions and stories - I think one of the purposes of it is to provide a memorization and structuring tool for the allusions the kids would learn (remember it was meant to be memorized, not read), kind of like a neumonic device in modern study methods? With moral guidance as one goal....

Actually, that is sort of what I was getting at with each genre being its own sort of thing - with a mastery of the vocabulary and knowledge of the allusions 三字经 can be understood fully, these are quite challanging to obtain, but no real knowledge of how classical chinese grammer worked needed - whereas reading 庄子 would probably find its challange in working thrugh difficult constructions and metaphors, and the quote I pasted earlier probably entirely a matter of understanding the grammar.

周易 is something I haven't dared to attempt yet - it is probably one of the hardest texts you could find, as the grammar and usage (and sometimes even word meanings) of the time it was written is older and stranger than most of the texts one reads, and the meaning obscure enough to make context little help. But I'm sure with detailed commentsry it can be a very fun challange.

Btw, can I recomend http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Literary-Chinese-Harvard-Monographs/dp/067402270X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1356979300&sr=8-1&keywords=Literary+chinese+harvard

It is the textbook used for first year classical chinese course here at Harvard, I remember liking it quite alot, and it has lots of really fun stories.

Hi tingyun

Thanks very much for your detailed response - unfortunately we just come to expect it of you!

Some thoughtful points - I am better informed about both classical Chinese and contemporary Chinese.

I'm a little defensive of Chinese as well, but in a less informed way. I've been 'reading' the San Zi Jing for a year now (how time flies) - now how you categorise that I'm not sure. Children's literature? I understand that it is not particularly old, but it is a collection and distillation of older works. Anyway, it is challenging enough for me, in the sense that Moser mentioned - you have to read a whole lot of other literature to really understand it. I also had to constantly refer to an historical timeline to keep some perspective on one part of it. I often get a warm response from Chinese people I meet when I say I've read it. (Admittedly some young people think it's funny that I should read it, and I can remember one young woman saying she was brought up on the Simpsons.)

I've also just picked up 周易 - mainly because it was the first in a new series of cute little purple paperbacks 《读点经典》. And because it was half price, but it seems all books here are at least half price. My first aim is to understand how to read it rather than to understand the substantive content. Or just to look at the pictures ... :)

Your comment about Japanese: 'something about how the words seem to run together in fast speech, I can't make out where one word stops and another begins, and it seems a lot of syllabiles are barely pronounced' - I found this with French, doesn't it apply to learning all languages?

Hmm, Rj and Bodawei's points are well taken...Perhaps the frequent antiintellectualism that gets expressed in US culture has me oversensitive, and wanting to leap to the defense of my brothers and sisters in spirit over the last 3000 years...

But to Zhenlijiang's point, I think there was something about the language he used, coupled with a knowing attitude, that made me feel the tongue in cheek was merely an excuse, and many parts of this were coming from a place of bitterness and resentment. And, honestly, he is expressing attidudes that are very prevalent and accepted by many people, so it's a little hard to take things as purely joking, and even if you soften his rhetoric substantially, I still firmly disagree with many ofthe points made.

Back to Bodawei's post, classical chinese is constant enough for things to stay say 80 percent thesame, but there are changes in time (particularly in the densness of allusion, the degree of directness or decoration of language, etc, and not on a linear path), though these changes are less significant than between genre (史记 might be a good example of fairly neutral genre, everyone trained can read it, but it is only because of special training that one can really understand, say, budhist texts, or official/administrative records, or dense philosophy, or medical texts). Your point about no new types of classical chinese being produced now is valid, but rather unimportant, as you will never exhaust the important works, genres, and types already produced, so from a person's perspective there is always new stuff. Actually, a little over 2000 years ago the historian 司马迁 launched into an extended critique of confusician thought, the center of his criticism - they have far too many books that they say must be read, in several lives you could not read them all, it is a doomed project. Tht was 2000 years ago, imagine the situation now. ;)

I find contemporary chinese as you define it to not be much of a problem to learn, because we are only required to basically learn the past couple of years of it, and I've spent enough time on qq to, say, know that 蹂躏 doesn't have the serious meaning of 'oppression' anymore but is more like tease or bully in a slight perhaps playful way, and a trip to 百度百科 can get you the meaning of the prominent new internet slang and such, really its not much material.

But if we had to learn contemporary chinese over the past 100s of years...now that would be difficult, not to mention 1000s of years...take the example of Hongloumeng for example, which most learners will find very difficult for a vry long time, and probably mistakenly think is written in classical chinese - it is in fact written in contemporary chinese as you define it, just its the contemporary chinese people were using a few hundred years ago...

But this bring me back to the point everyone raised, and why I react so strongly to this description of classical chinese - its because I truly love how it allows appreciation for and connection to human experience going back thousands of years, and how it allows one to break out of the narrow ways our lives are expressed in the few decades we by chance find ourselves born into. Just take the quote I incuded above, which shows us the depth of love in a context where women were required to stay at home- A husband says to his wife, I wish you could turn into a man, and then we could travel and see the world together, the wife says wait until I'm old and gray haired and we can at least travel to the closer places, the man says but when you are gray haired you won't be able to walk, the wife says if we can't during this life, then we place our hopes and expecations in our next life (not literal translation, just quickly jotted down meaning from memory...though The last line I have memorized, 今世不能，期以来世, necause it's so beautiful)

The sense of love as spiritiual companionship (and the comparitive unimportance of male vs female body or old vs young) and mutual exploration and fun in the world, and the casual and natural assumption of a love that transcends this life and would want to contnue to be together, are what makes this piece so beutiful to me. But it goes across the full range of human experience, take 报任安书, where Sima Qian discusses his sense of making greatness from personal tradgedy...

So the charecterization of classical chinese as this limitied, bookish thing disconected from human experience, is so much of a distortion that I can't abide it, even if made in half joking form.

Zhenlijiang, haha, John mentions final fantasy 2 for the snes...also one of my favorite childhood games (though I never got to level 99...). Yes, it is interesting that we had similar reactions, I seem to remember some time in the past when we made some similar error of understanding some grammatical form or something. Oh, as for Japanese, I started learning it recently (requirement for Phds in Chinese History), and I am finding it much more difficult than Chinese...something about how the words seem to run together in fast speech, I can't make out where one word stops and another begins, and it seems alot of syllabiles are barely pronounced...sigh, hopefully will make progress soon!

Hi Tingyun, guess you haven't seen this thread from April 2009:

http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/4718#comment-116298

You can see my reaction to this same article. I dislike whining (deliberate or not) and found it a tough read. He lost me at the comparisons to (an English speaker) learning to read French.

Now John, who obviously tactfully didn't butt in there, did post this in his blog Nov 2010:

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2010/11/12/why-learning-chinese-is-hard

He links to the Moser article as well, helpfully and preemptively saying "Please note that David Moser’s article is tongue-in-cheek". I took that to mean readers who reacted like me.

Now I wonder why, since the piece is tongue-in-cheek, we both missed that and reacted as dismissively as we did (though not really for the same reasons), even though we know a bit about David Moser? I re-read his piece just now and still find it a tough read!

For what it's worth and since so many who have commented seem to agree that Japanese is much easier than Chinese, I'd like to say that Japanese is hard for us natives too. Though fluent in my mother language I'm a weaker reader/writer in Japanese than most native speakers, and in my forties now I'm certain I will never reach the point where I'm reading Japanese for PURE pleasure. Unfortunate but true. If I don't use a dictionary I can get through novels and many essays (newspapers are fine. But I may not know how a word is pronounced) but I'll miss quite a lot. And it's work for me. It's work I can get pleasure out of, but still work. So I really don't get what those people mean.

Counting down the seconds now in my part of the world ...

Happy 2013 Everybody!

Hi tingyun

Yeah, I kinda agree with RJ, I think Moser is trying to be funny. I'm not sure how much a comedian needs to understand their subject matter .. that's a tough one. I think he would make a lot of learners laugh and so he's done his job. No serious learners are going to take all of what he says ... seriously.

BTW, what do you think of classical Chinese versus contemporary Chinese - by the latter I mean the Chinese that is being created and modified as we speak, the language that is very difficult to keep up with unless you either live here or follow the media closely - in terms of degree of difficulty. I have not studied classical Chinese, but I imagine that it is comparatively fixed. Once learnt, it doesn't keep changing, does it? Although I guess there are always new theories of interpretation to absorb. Whereas fully comprehending Weibo posts (apart from mine, which are not challenging at all) requires constant 'study'. :)

Hi Tim,

All true, but I tend to think Moser was being a little tongue in cheek, as well as viewing the world from the perspective of a new student to Chinese. Who hasnt felt this way? I know I have, although as I learn I have outgrown some of these emotions and if I ever catch up with my role model (that would be you), I no doubt would come to see things as you do. Pigs will no doubt take flight before I catch up with you, but hey, its good to have a stretch goal.

it works, I will make you a live link but cant do it in a "reply". See post below.

Hey Dave, that link doesn't work for me. Is that address right?

Moser is overstating the case. The meaning of most english words isn't a combination of their component parts, and yet for the vast majority of chinese words this is true. You won't always be able to guess a new word's meaning in isolation (though you often will, and it keeps getting easier), but with context, the chance is pretty decent.

The article was somewhat interesting, but reads alot like the complaints of a learner (at least in reference to readng) who still has a long way to go, and so there is a certain insight missing. He complains he can't read Hongloumeng because it's too difficult, and then promptly complains that chinese 'doesn't have the sense to use an alphebet' (reading hongloumeng in pinyin, now that would be substantially more difficult), he is still stuck in the "oh the charecter system is so confusing" stage and hasn't come to appreciate just how logical it is, and he states one can't understand classical chinese unless you 'already know what it says' - well, the really difficult obscure philosophical stuff sometimes noone really knows exactly what it says and everyone debates their interpretations, so clearly the statement is not applicable there, and in the easier stuff like 史记 or say random court decisions (which I work with in my research) someone with solid training is going to be able to understand with some effort. Though on the flip side, most educated native chinese people vastly overestimate their classical chinese or older vernacular chinese abilities, unless they pursued such texts as an interest or recieved formal training, they end up being pretty hopeless when actually encountering them, getting only a vague sense of the meaning and missing anything difficult or tricky.

Of course he's right about there being silly expectations for 4th or 5th year students, and that people study for 10 years and don't get up to these things, but this is a question of time worked and focus...there are amazing researchers of classical chinese literature who can work with old texts with no problem, but struggle to have a conversation about even basic things, and of course many great conversationists who are pretty hopeless at reading anything...and of course also people who would have no trouble reading a modern book but would fall apart at any real classical Chinese (ie other than set expressions that are common)

Also, most of his complaints about charecter difficult seems to be in writing - reflecting the silly predjudices of his profession, the idea that one must learn how to handwrite a charecter to 'know' it. Things get alot easier when you rely on typing for anything complex, recognition is so much easier than production...

And a paragraph on difficulties of looking up in dictionaries - was this written pre Pleco and the other electronic tools that make this so easy?

Edit - Sigh, his attitude towards classical chinese is depressngly ignorant, he says: "classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms"

There are many, many kinds of classical chinese, many different styles, reform movements within prose (like when 韩愈 some 1000 years ago criticized the overuse of flowery language and loss of meaning, launching a reform movement and giving to the rise the term 文以载道, language used instrumentally for the purpose of conveying meaning), he apparently saw some random flowery passage in some textbook and decided everything was the same (and put a rather bitter and whiny spin on it too).

Here's a chengyu to learn - 井底之蛙 jing3di3zhi1wa1, a frog at the bottom of a well (looking up at a the tiny visible section of the sky, and concluding that he understands heaven and earth)...

Edit 2 - eh, this kind of pompous ignorancein relation to classical chinese really bothers me...here's a beautiful passage, from a husband's description of his conversation with his wife, there is not a single alussion in there, the language of beautifully written and flows to the extent that someone with good classical chinese ability can read it at the same speed as they would modern chinese or english, and yet the language possesses a beauty that only classical chinese does, something the modern language could not replicate...

余尝曰：“惜卿雌而伏，苟能化女为男，相与访名山，搜胜迹，遨游天下，不亦快哉！”芸曰：“此何难，俟妾鬓斑之后，虽不能远游五岳，而近地之虎阜、灵岩，南至西湖，北至平山，尽可偕游。”余曰：“恐卿鬓斑之日，步履已艰。”芸曰，“今世不能，期以来世。”

"Terse, miserly code"...Moser really should stick to talking about things he has a basic understanding of.

though knowing the characters at least gives a chance to try to think and figure out meaning of words or type in the pinyin into a cell phone dictionary like i do...

thats true, Chinese students learning English get so hung up on how many words they know which seems to be the emphasis in China's English education. Just because they "know" the words individually doesn't mean they know how to use them or understand them in different contexts. I've found that out through my teaching experiences here.

And I was just being nice about 2492...it sounds to me more like a winning number for a lotto ticket or raffle. :) I read somewhere that 2,000 is for reading simple local newspaper and perhaps 2,500 is for something like the New York Times.

I was doing the same with my answer (although 2,500 does strike like a reasonable number). I was just trying to build humor on your humor with my post. :)

For the record... My post about the number was a total fabrication out of my head and at the time had no semblence with anything I have seen or heard in reality. I guess this is just my way of saying that when I wrote that post, I was just being an ass... :)

For me I remember a word more from reading an article or a fun dialogue like ChinesePod. The flash cards I use for testing and review.

Thanks for looking this up and posting it here. I went and tried the tests. Interesting.

http://chinesepod.com/community/conversations/post/13063

this post contains some links for testing how many words and characters you know

I agree that's probably about right. I just couldn't resist adding to the fun!

Is there a test anyone knows of to find out how many characters one recognizes? I think I know lots of characters, but I definitely can't read a newspaper without help. Often, I know all the characters involved in a word or phrase, but don't know what the meaning is when they are arranged in a given manner.

I've checked out mandarin tools, but I get tired of the flashcard approach, so I didn't stick with it. (But I do think I ought to be using it - I often struggle to recognize characters just because they are out of the context I am used to seeing them in.)

Guolan, I use the flashcard at http://www.mandarintools.com/ to review the Chinese characters. Two thousand five hundred, more or less, is just about right for newspaper reading . By the waym I just visited the website and I am afraid that the Java program is outdate and the flashcard does not work. I hope they will upgrade it!

I beg to differ. 2493 is the authoritative and definitive answer anyone would give if they merely considered the issue from all angles.

:)

I agree with you on 2492.

P.s.... if you really want a number.... Here it is.... 2492!

I somewhat distrust native speaker's estimates of what one needs to know. They known a lot that they aren't aware they know. A few people have told me that the Taiwan constitution only uses 2200 characters. I think I know that many, but I still encounter ones I don't know in a Newspaper. Many are names of people, places and businesses, or related to specialized topics.

Cool! Will check it out.

Perhaps watching the show 非常了得 would help illustrate it's meaning? ;)

Contestents listen to people telling crazy sounding stories, and then have to guess whether it is 真 or 假...The stories are often, true to the title, 非常了得, though at the very least they are entertaining, and so listening to them probably makes for good language practice for learners.

http://fcld.jstv.com/video/

That's the official website, where they post the videos - Just select any of the episode links...or you could just use a search engine and the name.