Call for participation...
henning
July 16, 2008, 05:47 AM posted in General DiscussionActually I don't see this group confined to my little character group collections. In fact, any character related discussions are fine.
If other users provide their own "character group", I am of course more than happy, but if you want to pursue other approaches to the characters (e.g. other types of groupings, a more one-character in-depth approach, etyhmology driven etc.) you are warmly invited to add them here.
Join the group - and let's jointly turn this into the mad character learning container.
changye
July 17, 2008, 05:45 AMGood job!
changye
July 16, 2008, 03:58 PMHi henning,
Hehe, you might be right. There are only about 20,000 Chinese characters in Unicode, including traditional, simplified, and even original characters made in foreign countries such as Korea and Japan.
Just for your information, you can see some Korean-made characters 乤, 乫, 乭 in the seventh line in the Unicode chart you mentioned. They were used only for names of people and places in Korea.
You can also find made-in-Japan Kanji characters, such as 畑, 峠, 辻 and 裃 in the chart, and some of them are still frequently used in Japan. 畑 and 辻 are listed in dictionaries published in China.
On the other hand, some made-in-mainland characters, e.g.曌 and 圀, are not listed in ordinary dictionaries in China, although they are relatively well known from the historical point of view.
They are called “则天文字”, which were invented in the 8th century by the famous (or notorious) Chinese empress “武则天” just for the purpose of praising her. They went out of use after her death.
As for 说文解字, I recommend you get one in modern speech, or an annotation text, when you come to China next time. I have one with both pinyin and radical indexes. They are really useful.
henning
July 16, 2008, 05:27 PMHi Changye,
actually in Unicode 5.1 there is a total of 74,480 defined character slots...
But the standard set only includes 20,902; the rest is coded in "Extensions" and the necessary fonts do not come with your avarage OS. I read someplace that you will install them when you plan to use 五笔.
I guess it is safe to assume that one will only rarely meet those characters because of that "not-default"-restriction (and they are certainly not discovered by me as I search with Google Pinyin).
Regarding non-Mandarin Hanzi: When I compiled those groups beginning of the year I did indeed not look with enough care at the explanations in http://zdic.net/zd/; some characters in my list are indeed Japanese or even Cantonese only.
user76423
July 16, 2008, 06:14 PMHi Henning:
I would recommend to concentrate on the 3500 most important characters. A good start may be this list (2700 most important characters) or the HSK-Lists.
I would first neglect all characters outside of these lists. No Chinese person knows all the characters defined in Unicode!
My personal aim is to "explain" 2000 characters with collocations (in German, no ressources to do this in English; there are excellent websites already), which gives 97 % understanding. In the moment I am at 850 ch. and I think I need 1-2 years to complete this. I do this only for me personally (publishing it on the web is a by-product). Only with a database and a lot of hyperlinking one can manage such an amount of information...
A good book of 3000 (trad.) characters (Taiwan Ministry of Education's list of 3,000 essential Chinese characters), and which a person in Taiwan should know, is this book, which I like very much. It's now also available in simplified characters. Knowing these characters, one will be able to recognize 99 percent of the characters published in various Chinese media.
henning
July 16, 2008, 06:30 PMHi hape,
the rare characters are just a fallout from the search process; I add the rest of the information out of curiosity. That is also why I don't stop at 6,000. To make it nonetheless usable I apply the color-coding.
2000 characters is definately a good start (beyond that it definately goes easier), but unfortunatelly the journey isn't over then.
You might read 97% of a text, but usually the rest 3% happen to contain the core information. Once I got a book as a present, but to my embarresment I wasn't able to tell what it was about. It discussed 阀 (閥) in the context of 坝 （壩）...
I would say at 6000 you reach a level which about equals the literacy level of an average Chinese with an academic degree.
(Hand-)writing is a completely different story.
user1283
July 17, 2008, 04:25 AMIt would be nice if we can tackle the 2700 characters by P Zein. Do you think we can get Chinesepod to do an MP3 on these 2700 characters? thanks, jung from Atlanta
henning
July 17, 2008, 05:27 AMhape indeed shared a good source there.
user1283: The Chinesepod team repeatedly announced that they will not tackle any written language (for reasons I cannot really follow).
So I guess we have to do this by ourselves. This is what this group is for. I will continue to post my collections, but if you want to address the matter differently (e.g. gathering CPod example sentences for the characters in the Zein list, looking up stroke order, ethymology,...) I encourage you to do so.
changye
July 17, 2008, 05:28 AMHi henning,
By the way, I can see 一万多汉子 in the avatar. It is a typo, isn't it?
changye
July 17, 2008, 05:43 AMDon't mind. The original meaning of 字 is a baby, anyway. The shape of the character indicates a baby in a house. Sometimes you can use etymology as a good excuse. Skill is no burden.
changye
July 17, 2008, 03:17 AMHi guys,
I’ve just run through the list (2,700 most important characters) shown by hape. Let me proudly say that I have almost no difficulty reading and interpreting them, although I’m not confident that I can write all of them. You have no need to praise me, this is NOT because I’m a diligent learner, but only because I happen to be a native JAPANESE.
In Japan, people learn about 2,000 Kanji characters at elementary and junior high school. And well-educated persons are generally supposed to be able to read (and write?) more than 3,000 characters. Confusingly enough, every Japanese Kanji usually has a few readings, sometimes several, and, at worst, more than ten. Can you believe this?
There is a Kanji competency test in Japan. You are required to be able to read and write about 6,000 and 3,000 Kanji characters to get the first and second certificate respectively. I hear only a few hundred people pass the first grade test every year. I think 6,000 characters are too much even for educated Chinese people, let alone Japanese.
changye
July 16, 2008, 07:28 AMHi henning,
你最近对汉字的讲究让我佩服得五体投地。但是，怎么说呢，我觉得这系列的帖子有点太内行。不瞒你说，我这个汉字迷的日本人都往往不知写什么样的评论才行，根本就无法发帖子。你看，康熙字典里有将近五万个汉字（包括俗字异体字等等）。
如果你每次提出十个汉字就意味着需要发五千条帖子，就是没完没了。你愿意加深对汉字的理解和认识的话，我劝你先研究一下说文解字里的五百四十个部首或者是小篆金文甲骨文。我保证很容易过瘾。虽然那么说，你还是走自己的路吧！加油！